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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.
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.”
