Glass's Infrastructure

Glass is built using a segregated, microservices based infrastructure, hosted on a global CDN, with data encrypted and stored in the EU.

Glass's Global Script Serving CDN

Our analytics script is distributed globally using Cloudflare's CDN. Our script is less 1kB- more than 100x smaller than Google Analytics.

Glass's Ingest Infrastructure

Glass's ingest structure is designed to scale almost limitlessly.

To achieve this, Glass leverages Cloudflare Workers' serverless infrastructure.

When a data point is received from a client, Cloudflare allocates a worker to process it.

The worker strips the IP address (returning an irreversible private session hash), and adds geo-location information provided by Cloudflare's network.

The worker then encrypts the data and forwards it to Google BigQuery, our underlying data warehouse.

Google BigQuery

BigQuery is Google's peta-byte scale data warehouse.

We leverage BigQuery's parallel analytical query and column oriented architecture to generate reports and tracking data in less than a second.

Glass uses BigQuery's EU data isolation so that all data is stored in the EU, to comply with GDPR frameworks.

When data arrives at BigQuery, we record the original payload as JSON.

The data is then automatically materialized into partitioned and clustered tables that allow for high performance querying.

The segregated nature of our ingest and analytics schemas allow us to maintain very high availability, even with large traffic spikes.