https://www.gstatic.com/bricks/image/83819442-50e8-415e-a5de-a1c50f2696b6.png

Signify: Illuminating the connected world with Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Cloud Results

With GKE as its foundation, the Philips Hue Platform has scaled its infrastructure to support a 1,150% increase in transactions and commands over the past decade

Signify’s Philips Hue Platform has established Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the foundation for its cloud infrastructure to build an industrialized, optimized, and highly automated architecture to innovate at scale while controlling costs.

Scaling infrastructure to support expansion

Containerization through Kubernetes has shaped our evolution. It has allowed us to grow while maintaining control over the customer experience.

Leon Bouwmeester

Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify

Formerly known as Philips Lighting, Signify is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers, and the Internet of Things. Signify operates a fleet of over 153 million connected light points worldwide across its various brands, including Philips Hue.

As a long-term Google Cloud customer, Philips Hue was an early adopter of Kubernetes , experimenting with it just one year after its open source release in 2014. With a global business, the team needed to be able to scale quickly and efficiently as different regions spiked in traffic, whether its massive morning switch-ons in Europe or the activation of ambient scenarios at dusk in the Americas.

Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) soon became the foundation for Philips Hue's infrastructure, scaling to handle natural lighting patterns across the world, while keeping lighting costs under control.

"Containerization through Kubernetes has shaped our evolution. It has allowed us to grow while maintaining control over the customer experience," says Leon Bouwmeester, Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify.

Shortly after containerizing with Kubernetes, Philips Hue adopted GKE, the first managed Kubernetes service launched in 2015. This service, which combines high availability, native security, and autoscaling capabilities, quickly established itself as the robust and scalable foundation Philips Hue needed to support its global development. This choice proved decisive: it allowed Philips Hue to absorb the explosion in traffic while guaranteeing the reliability and performance of its services worldwide.

In 2016, Philips Hue's GKE-powered infrastructure handled 200 million transactions every day, including 18 million remote lighting commands. Today, nearly a decade later, the Philips Hue Platform continues to be powered by GKE and now handles over 3.5 billion transactions daily, including 100 million lighting commands. As Philips Hue expands its global business, with an 1,150% increase in traffic since 2016, GKE has scaled its support to handle these growing workloads, ready for Philips Hue's growth in the next decade of innovation.

Over the years, the company's architecture has grown, going from a single GKE cluster to seven, distributed between external request processing and internal operations. This transformation, driven by resilience and scalability, was accompanied by constant attention to latency. "In the world of connected lighting, a response time reduced to a few hundred milliseconds radically changes the user perception," emphasizes Leon Bouwmeester. "When the user says 'turn off the living room lights,' for example, they expect an immediate response, almost simultaneous with their voice. A latency of three seconds is enough to break the illusion of fluidity and gives the impression that the system is slow, even faulty. In other words, for us, responsiveness is not a luxury: it's a fundamental requirement." By strengthening its autoscaling capabilities and leveraging the continuous evolutions of GKE, Philips Hue has been able to make this requirement a tangible reality for millions of users around the world.

Today, a developer spends a lot of time managing their execution environment. In the future, thanks to a shared platform, they will be able to go from idea to production in a few hours, with the same logic from one project to another.

Leon Bouwmeester

Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify

Advanced architectures for evolving requirements

In the world of connected lighting, a response time reduced to a few hundred milliseconds radically changes the user perception. [...] A latency of three seconds is enough to break the illusion of fluidity and gives the impression that the system is slow, even faulty. In other words, for us, responsiveness is not a luxury: it's a fundamental requirement.

Leon Bouwmeester

Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify

The company's growth has not only resulted in increased traffic. It has also been accompanied by a diversification of its services, driven by the evolution of customer uses and expectations. In parallel, the technical foundation has also expanded to support this transformation, while remaining true to the principles of simplicity, performance, and cost control.

With GKE retaining its foundational role to ensure the scalability, resilience, and automation necessary for the operation of critical services at scale, new services have gradually been integrated into the tech stack to meet new needs. BigQuery is used to analyze internal flows, providing precise usage indicators and continuously informing technical decisions. To orchestrate certain background processes, such as triggering notifications, managing system events, or transmitting technical data, Philips Hue uses Cloud Run and Pub/Sub . This duo makes it possible to process asynchronous flows smoothly, without cluttering the main systems, while ensuring integration with the GKE ecosystem.

The whole system relies on Google Cloud's Observability , including Cloud Monitoring , Cloud Logging , and Cloud Trace , to ensure continuous supervision of the platform in a distributed global environment.

"The constant improvements made by GKE over the past ten years have considerably simplified our approach, contributing in particular to a streamlining of our architecture: where we once had to develop our own scaling mechanisms, everything is now automated. This profoundly changes the way we design, deploy, and evolve our services: we spend less time on infrastructure management and can focus our efforts on what really matters: the quality of the user experience and the speed of innovation," emphasizes Leon Bouwmeester.

The next decade: Platform engineering and AI with GKE

To support the growth of its platform, Philips Hue is looking to leverage GKE for new workloads, including platform engineering and AI.

On an organizational level, Philips Hue is working to establish a platform engineering practice, aiming to platformize their infrastructure, harmonize practices between teams, and free up time for application development. A dedicated team will soon ensure the maintenance, security, and evolution of the technical foundation, allowing developers to focus fully on product innovation. "Today, a developer spends a lot of time managing their execution environment. In the future, thanks to a shared platform, they will be able to go from idea to production in a few hours, with the same logic from one project to another," explains Leon Bouwmeester.

In parallel, Philips Hue is exploring AI for multi-cluster supervision. In an increasingly dense distributed environment, the objective is to transform a massive flow of technical signals into understandable and actionable diagnostics, capable of quickly guiding teams toward the causes of an incident.

The constant improvements made by GKE over the past ten years [...] profoundly changed the way we design, deploy, and evolve our services: we spend less time on infrastructure management and can focus our efforts on what really matters: the quality of the user experience and the speed of innovation.

Leon Bouwmeester

Director of Engineering and Head of Hue Platform at Signify

"Today, the system tells us what is happening, but it doesn't tell us what it means," summarizes Leon Bouwmeester. "Artificial intelligence can help us transform a set of technical logs into an intelligible explanation, capable of directly guiding the actions to be taken."

These evolutions are based on a solid cloud-native strategy, structured around GKE, that Philips Hue continues to evolve. For Leon Bouwmeester, the choice of Google Cloud has proven to be not only foundational from a technical point of view, but also decisive for controlling costs in a context of continuous scaling — a lever that has now become a real competitive advantage.

"In 2016, we were still in a very startup mindset, with a small team testing Kubernetes for the first time. Today, our infrastructure manages billions of requests per day on a global scale. This gradual ramp-up has allowed us to move from an experimental environment to a global, structured, and perfectly industrialized production platform — a transition we have carried out step by step, constantly benefiting from the advances of GKE and the support of the Google Cloud teams. With Google Cloud as our technological foundation, we are confident in our ability to evolve our platform to serve an ambition that remains unchanged: to offer increasingly seamless, intelligent, and high-performance connected lighting experiences on a global scale," concludes Leon Bouwmeester.

Formerly known as Philips Lighting, Signify is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers, and the Internet of Things. Its products deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings, and public spaces.