Back Market Expands Globally and Migrates Data to Aiven for Apache Kafka on Google Cloud

Back Market’s platform connects buyers and sellers of used electronic devices that have been refurbished. To strengthen its global expansion and enhance customer service, it made the strategic decision to transfer its operations to Google Cloud. This included migrating its Aiven for Apache Kafka clusters from another cloud provider while ensuring no loss of data. Thanks to the Aiven platform, Back Market was able to conduct the migration with minimal resources, minimal risk and no downtime, laying the foundations for further business growth.

A global leader in refurbished electronic goods

Launched in 2014, Back Market has saved one million tons of CO2 emissions by directing buyers away from new devices and has become the global leader in the refurbishment sector. In its first ten years, the company has reached more than 13 million customers in 18 countries. Last year, Back Market enjoyed 45% growth to a turnover of EUR 320m, and sales continue to soar. Today it is focused on strengthening its position in Europe, expanding its presence in Asia, cementing its place in the US and extending the 200 different categories of refurbished gadgets available on its platform.

While doing this, Back Market must ensure seamless customer service — essential for maintaining trust in the platform and its community of 1,700 refurbishers. The company relies heavily on real-time data and analytics to fine-tune the platform’s performance and create a fantastic experience for buyers and sellers.

Migrating Apache Kafka clusters from one cloud to another

In early 2024, Back Market decided to move its operations away from its existing cloud provider to Google Cloud. This included migrating Back Market’s critically important Aiven for Apache Kafka clusters. Back Market had several Apache Kafka® clusters in four regions: a live production cluster each for Europe, the US and Asia Pacific, and three clusters for its staging environment. There were also some smaller clusters used for development.

The company relies on Apache Kafka to flow operational data such as product information, pricing, availability and more to data analytics solutions. “Our use case isn’t that unusual,” says Tomer Levy, Data Engineer, Back Market. “We use Aiven for Apache Kafka to centralize data streaming in from a number of services and to sanitize it, before flowing it to our analysts and to key AI algorithms.”

Back Market uses valuable insights from the data and AI algorithms to optimize the performance of its platform. For example, identifying products most and least sold, customer buying patterns and the most valuable sellers. Another example is evaluating the products offered by different sellers and choosing the device that best meets a buyer’s unique needs.

These kinds of insights enhance the user experience as well as enabling the business to improve its margins. The Apache Kafka migration was critical since, if any service in the data infrastructure couldn't talk to the Kafka cluster, alot of valuable data and the related performance-enhancing services could be lost, decreasing the customer experience.

Aiven platform, tools and support make self-managed cloud migration possible

The relationship between Aiven and Back Market had begun three years earlier when the company revamped its data infrastructure, adopted Kafka as its data streaming platform and chose Aiven for Apache Kafka as a fully managed service.

Once Back Market had decided to move to Google Cloud, Levy and the team turned to Aiven for support with the upcoming migration. Aiven provides a platform available across multiple clouds, and all Aiven services can be located and relocated to different cloud vendors or regions. Despite this, Levy was concerned that the migration of the Kafka clusters would be a complex and time-consuming project.

However, following a discovery session to establish detailed requirements of the migration, Aiven demonstrated to the Back Market team that it would be a straightforward process.

“Aiven has a strong set of tools for migrating services which facilitated most of the heavy technical lifting when we changed cloud provider,” says Levy. “It’s a killer feature which made a notable difference to the project and our levels of confidence. You can easily rollback the changes if something doesn't work, which is reassuring.”

The second aspect of Aiven’s support was around networking, ensuring the clusters and services could still communicate after migration. “Aiven’s help with designing the network topology and taking advantage of Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering was invaluable,” says Levy.

Better decision-making after a smooth, seamless migration

In the end, it took just a few weeks for Back Market to plan and move all of its Kafka clusters to Google Cloud. Using Aiven for Apache Kafka with Aiven for Apache Kafka Connect, Back Market now streams data into its recently deployed, primary data warehouse, Google BigQuery.

Back Market managed the migration with no downtime, no interruption to business operations, and much less drain on internal resources. “Aiven significantly reduced the amount of time, resource and risk associated with our migration to Google Cloud,” says Levy.

Levy points to other advantages of working with Aiven: “The intuitive nature of the Aiven console significantly streamlines our Kafka setup process. Furthermore, the Aiven team continues to impress us with exceptional service. Their deep expertise helped us develop a tailored migration strategy, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition.”

With its data infrastructure running seamlessly in Google Cloud, and the Kafka pipelines streaming the data in real time, and with very low latency, Back Market is benefiting from a real-time understanding of commercial activity. This helps the business to make quick, informed decisions around the customer experience, its contribution to the circular economy and improvements to the bottom line.

“We are also confident about our ability to scale,” says Levy. “The business is growing and, with Aiven, we don’t have to worry about our data infrastructure holding us back. When we need to pop up a new Kafka cluster, it's much easier and faster to do so with Aiven.”

A long-lasting relationship exploring future opportunities

The migration to Google Cloud represents a new chapter for Back Market and its relationship with Aiven. “There are lots of opportunities to explore, and we’re hoping to set up some proofs of concept in the next few months,” says Levy. “We’re sure that whatever we do next, Aiven will help us get the most out of our real-time data infrastructure.”