Pokeman Go has been a raging success. But its launch was marred by frequent downtimes and dropped connections. In a recent chat at the Google Cloud Platform Next Conference, Niantic CTO Phil Keslin talked about the “hair on fire” experience where the team had to firefight and upgrade key components on the live production system in order to handle the unexpected surge in new users joining in. Among the various upgrades made to the system, Niantic had to replace the network load balancer with a much more sophisticated HTTP/S load balancing system that could handle a larger overall throughput and offer faster connections. Keslin says that this timely upgrade made it possible for his team to launch in Japan without an incident although the number of new user signups at this point was triple what it was during their earlier US launch.