GCP – How Buildertrend Drives Innovation with Memorystore for Valkey

Editor’s note: Today we hear from Buildertrend, a leading provider of cloud-based construction management software. Since 2006, the platform has helped more than a million users globally simplify business management, track financials, and improve communication. To support this massive scale and their ambitious vision, they rely on a robust technology stack on Google Cloud, including, recently, Memorystore for Valkey. Read on to hear about their migration from Memorystore for Redis to the new platform.

Running a construction business is a complex balancing act that requires a constant stream of real-time information to keep projects on track. At Buildertrend, we understand the challenges our customers face — from fluctuating material costs and supply chain delays to managing tight deadlines and the risk of budget overruns — and work to help construction professionals improve efficiency, reduce risk, and enhance collaboration, all while growing their bottom line. 

The challenge: Caching at scale

The construction industry has historically been slow to adopt new technologies, hindering efficiency and scalability. At Buildertrend, we aim to change this by being at the forefront of adopting new technology. When Memorystore for Valkey became generally available, we spent time looking into whether it could help us modernize our stack and deliver value to customers. We were attracted by Valkey’s truly open source posture and its promised performance benefits over competing technologies.

Before adopting Memorystore for Valkey, we had used Memorystore for Redis. While it served our basic needs, we found ourselves hitting a wall when it came to a critical feature: native cross-regional replication. As we scaled, we needed a solution that could support a global user base and provide seamless failover in case of a disaster or other issues within a region. We also needed a modern connectivity model such as Google Cloud’s Private Service Connect to enhance network security and efficiency.

As a fully managed, scalable, and highly available in-memory data store, Memorystore for Valkey offered the key features we needed out of the box to take our platform to the next level. 

A modern solution for a modern problem

Within this ecosystem, we use Memorystore for Valkey for a variety of critical functions, including:

• Database-backed cache: Speeds up data retrieval for a faster user experience

• Session state: Manages user sessions for web applications

• Job storage: Handles asynchronous task queues for background processes

• Pub/Sub idempotency keys: Ensures messages are processed exactly once, preventing data duplication

• Authentication tokens: Securely validates user identity with cryptographically signed tokens, enabling fast, scalable authentication

By leveraging the cache in these scenarios, our application is fast, resilient, and ready to meet the demands of our growing customer base. The native cross regional replication helped us support a global user base without having to worry about keeping global caches in sync.

A seamless migration with minimal disruption

Migrating from Memorystore for Redis to Memorystore for Valkey was a smooth process, thanks to close collaboration with the Google Cloud team. We worked with the Google Cloud team to identify the best approach, which for us involved exporting data to Google Cloud Storage and seeding the data at Valkey instance creation, allowing us to migrate with minimal downtime. Because Memorystore for Valkey natively supports Private Service Connect, we were able to eliminate a proxy layer that our engineers used to connect to our Memorystore for Redis instances, simplifying our stack and improving our networking posture. 

Looking ahead to a global future

Although it’s still early in our journey, the impact is already clear. Memorystore for Valkey has unlocked our ability to scale and drastically reduced our time to market. It has allowed our team to streamline and own deployment processes, so they can be more agile and responsive.

For us, the future is about global scalability. With nearly 300 Memorystore for Valkey instances in our fleet, we’re building a globally available, cloud-native stack. Our most critical instances are highly optimized to serve up to 30,000 requests per second each, demonstrating the foundation’s scalability and performance. 

We strive to use scalable cloud-native technologies, and Memorystore for Valkey will enable us to continue down this path. By using the Memorystore for Valkey managed service, we not only solve technical problems, but also accelerate business growth and empower engineering teams to focus on what matters most: building great products.

Ready to build with Memorystore for Valkey?

Like Buildertrend, you can leverage the power of a fully managed, scalable, and highly available in-memory data store to accelerate your applications and empower your development teams.

To get started, explore the Memorystore for Valkey documentation and sign up for a Google Cloud account!