E-commerce giant simplifies its architecture and accelerates growth

Founded in 2007, Flipkart has grown into one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world. It offers products across electronics, fashion, home essentials, and groceries to over 200 million users and is known for its Big Billion Days sale and services like Flipkart Plus and SuperCoins. In 2018, Walmart acquired a 77% stake in the company for $16 billion, one of the largest e-commerce acquisitions in history. With a strong focus on technology and logistics, Flipkart consistently innovates to enhance its customer experience.

Inefficient virtual machine-based infrastructure hindered performance across 40+ Aerospike deployments

Flipkart’s extensive operations demanded a scalable and efficient database infrastructure to handle diverse workloads, including caching, data storage, and user applications like search, product pages, and recommendations.

Initially, Flipkart managed over 40 Community Edition Aerospike deployments using virtual machines (VMs), each managed by individual teams. This decentralized approach led to several challenges:

• Scattered deployments

  VM-based clusters were difficult to standardize and optimize, leading to inconsistent performance and high operational costs.

• Resource inefficiency

  Virtualization overhead and the challenge of optimizing VMs for diverse workloads resulted in wasted resources and inefficient scaling.

• High operational complexity

  Managing VMs required significant manual effort, especially for routine tasks like hot edits and hardware management, making it difficult to maintain performance consistency across clusters.

Centralized, automated, and scalable database management with Kubernetes and Aerospike

Flipkart created a centralized team to manage Aerospike as a shared service across the company, consolidating all Aerospike deployments under one umbrella. This transition, along with an upgrade to Aerospike Enterprise Edition and the implementation of Kubernetes, allowed Flipkart to efficiently manage over 170 clusters, automating tasks and optimizing performance at scale.

The Aerospike Kubernetes Operator (AKO) played a crucial role in scaling and automating database operations, enabling seamless management across environments.

• Unified management

  Centralized Aerospike operations as a shared service, standardizing deployments and improving resource efficiency across multiple teams.

• Efficient scaling

  KO enabled effortless horizontal and vertical scaling, ensuring infrastructure could handle growing demand with minimal manual intervention.

• Automation and self-service

  Automated deployment, scaling, and monitoring processes reduced operational overhead and allowed teams to focus on core tasks.

• Optimized performance

  Running Aerospike on bare metal through Kubernetes improved resource utilization, bypassing virtualization for better overall performance.

Streamlined operations, enhanced scalability, and cost savings

With Aerospike and Kubernetes, Flipkart significantly improved its data management infrastructure, enhancing performance and delivering a seamless customer experience.

• Boosted performance

  Achieved 95 million transactions per second (TPS) during its Big Billion Days sale, one of India’s largest retail events.

• Increased scalability

  With AKO, Flipkart’s infrastructure scaled automatically and efficiently, ensuring 100% availability and uninterrupted service.

• Cost savings

  AKO’s automation reduced operational overhead and infrastructure costs by minimizing the need for overprovisioning.