Arquivei creates architecture for data democratization with Google Cloud

Arquivei is a company based in São Carlos (São Paulo state). Its main product is a web platform for managing electronic tax documents. Employing around 370 staff, it aims to reduce the level of bureaucracy involved in solutions for electronic tax documents by facilitating access to them and related information.

Arquivei also offers a wide range of additional products for business departments that use data contained in electronic tax documents, such as Tax, Procurement, Sales, Compliance, and Finance. By making it easier to manage tax-related data, companies can gain a more strategic view of their businesses.

Digital-native Arquivei first relied on another cloud provider. In 2018, after participating in Google for Startups Accelerator, a program supporting successful, diverse, and inclusive startup communities across the globe, the company began reimagining its cloud architecture.

Opportunities brought by innovation in IT

Migration kicked off in 2018 and took a few months to complete. Throughout the process, Arquivei received support from Google Cloud’s professionals, who provided guidance and tailored solutions based on the company’s needs. The purpose was to give a more granular view over the new infrastructure to leverage the most out of it.

The electronic tax document platform architecture is now based on three processes: document ingestion, storage, and data availability for product teams.

For ingestion purposes, the company uses Pub/Sub to orchestrate and queue up all documents. For storage, Cloud Bigtable and Filestore come into play. Dataflow is also used to replicate indexed data from XML files into BigQuery.

In terms of data availability, Cloud Bigtable and BigQuery are sources of information that Arquivei’s APIs can query. Cloud Storage is used to provide availability of binary files and to help create compressed files.

The advantages of good performance

For Rafael Girolineto, the level of scalability and performance of Google Cloud’s databases make them an essential part of the company’s architecture and enable data democratization.

Supporting high volumes of processes performed daily is another advantage, which makes backup replication easier using Dataflow.

The number of native connectors available between services also enables the company to scale business more efficiently and quickly deliver software to product engineering teams.

In the end, figures speak for themselves: the new infrastructure made it possible to migrate 1.5 billion electronic invoices in under 24 hours, and also to lower costs by nearly 20% after the migration.

The IT team is currently assessing other Google Cloud solutions. The company intends to explore the advantages of Looker so that it can create a data exploration platform. In the mid-term, there are plans for a machine-learning-tool project, meaning that innovation will continue to play a role in Arquivei’s future.