Rakuten

01. challenges

Originally launched under the name Tradoria, Rakuten.de began as a small start-up – although “small” did not apply to the start-up for long: in the first two years alone, Rakuten.de grew to over 2,000 retailers. In its seventh year, the platform already counted over 24 million articles.
Such rapid growth is probably a challenge for any IT platform – yet Rakuten.de managed to guarantee an availability of 99.99% during this development phase.

The lone LAMP stack server powered Rakuten.de in the first year so far so good. While the platform was expanded to 650 stores, there was no downtime. In the second year, it was time to upgrade to a failover cluster: In addition to a database cluster, Xen application, request tracker ticketing and SOLR search servers were configured on 1.5 TB SAN storage load balancing. This high-availability setup ensured that Rakuten.de could continue to exist in the years that followed and – if necessary – additional servers could be added without any problems.

With the adjustments and further growth, not only was a greater need for resources to be expected, but also increasingly more work with the operation and optimization of the infrastructure.

02. solutions

In anticipation of continuous growth, Rakuten.de decided to outsource its IT resources from the outset: load balancing, high availability and scalability were the top priorities. All the desired requirements were met by NETWAYS Managed Services – which is why they were chosen. NETWAYS’ experience with complex clusters for large platforms – such as the European social network StayFriends – gave Rakuten.de additional confidence. Most importantly, NETWAYS presented the start-up with a growth strategy: this included a cost-effective entry plan and an infrastructure that could be scaled like Rakuten.de.

“We needed more than just hardware and maintenance. We needed a partner we could trust and who could help us develop our IT infrastructure in parallel with the growth of our business. That’s why we chose NETWAYS,” says Daniel Kirstenpfad, CTO at Rakuten Deutschland GmbH.

03. success

The NETWAYS team has developed a new image management program for Rakuten.de, namely automatic image scaling. Store operators only need to upload a large image and Rakuten.de will display the photo in any desired size – within milliseconds. With just two image servers and two SAS high-speed lasers, the image management system can handle an incredible load. More than 500 images are scaled per second and 8000 images can be viewed by Rakuten.de users at any time.

Scaling can even take place while the shopping platform goes about its business and sells goods. Combined with NETWAYS’ 24/7 support, Rakuten.de and its partner retailers never have to worry about downtime. This is of course more than valuable, especially during promotional events such as Rakuten.de’s annual Super Sale, where traffic on the marketplace and in the stores often multiplies within hours. NETWAYS achieved this architectural responsiveness through the gradual decoupling of processes and applications. After setting up the subdomains, processes in applications such as the marketplace checkout were isolated and buffered so that they could run independently of each other. This has led to immense efficiency gains, not to mention flexibility in the use of resources. Ultimately, a cloud-like environment was achieved and Rakuten.de’s platform was able to utilize resources more like services. The service-based environment offers database, image, ticketing and search services as well as monitoring, firewall, load balancing and backup. Thanks to this decoupled architecture, Rakuten.de is well equipped for its annual growth: with stability, security and availability.

Daniel Kirstenpfad says: “If we look back over the last 5+ years, we have seen an average growth of 500% in registered stores and transactions. Along the way, NETWAYS has provided us with invaluable expertise and comprehensive support – simply a hosting and managed services partner we can rely on.“