Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 11 December 2017

Silph Road embraces cloud and containers with Canonical

The Silph Road is the premier grassroots network for Pokémon GO players around the world offering research, tools, and resources to the largest Pokémon GO community worldwide, with up to 400,000 visitors per day

Operating a volunteer-run, community network with up to 400,000 daily visitors is no easy task especially in the face of massive and unpredictable demand spikes, and with developers spread all over the world. With massive user demand and with volunteer developers located all over the world, The Silph Road’s operations must be cost-effective, flexible, and scalable.

This led the Pokémon GO network first to cloud, and then to containers and in both cases Canonical ’s technology was the answer.

Highlights

  • Containerisation with Canonical’s Distribution of Kubernetes helped reduce cloud build by 40%
  • Autoscaling makes coping with spikes in user demand easy and cost-effective
  • Juju enables The Silph Road to migrate between public clouds with less than 2 minutes downtime

For more information and to view the case study please visit Silph Road Case Study

Related posts

Isobel Kate Maxwell
13 February 2026

The foundations of software: open source libraries and their maintainers

Community Article

Open source libraries are repositories of code that developers can use and, depending on the license, contribute to, modify, and redistribute. Open source libraries are usually developed on a platform like GitHub, and distributed using package registries like PyPI for Python and npm for JavaScript. These repositories contain pre-written, ...

Miguel Divo
13 February 2026

From inspiration to impact: design students from Regent’s University London explore open design for their dissertation projects

Design Article

Last year, we had the opportunity to speak at Regent’s UX Conference (Regent’s University London’s conference to showcase UX work by staff, students, and alumni), where we engaged with students to make them aware of open design and their ability to contribute design skills to open source projects. The talk sparked great discussion, and we ...

Lidia Luna Puerta
12 February 2026

When an upstream change broke smartcard FIPS authentication – and how we fixed it

Ubuntu Article

This is the story of how Canonical’s Support team provided bug-fix support: we tracked down an upstream change in OpenSC that inadvertently broke FIPS compatibility, coordinated with upstream developers across distributions, and delivered both a hotfix and a proper universal solution. ...