Wayfair: Moving sofas in millisecond time

Wayfair, one of the world’s leading home furnishing platforms, has undergone immense and rapid growth; 15.2 million active customers, more than 14 million products on offer, and the successful creation of a retail holiday that pushed its systems to the limit. “Way Day”, as it’s affectionately known, was full of highs and lows, and showed the Distributed Systems team it needed a higher performance database than Cassandra. The demand for both on-premises datacenters and multiple in the cloud was telling – then came along Aerospike. The Wayfair platform leverages Aerospike for customer scoring and segmentation, tracking events online, “listening” to customer activity for marketing decisions, onsite advertising, and recommendation engines. In the process of implementing Aerospike, Wayfair was able to cut its server footprint to 1/8th of what it was previously, keeping up its commitment to a superior customer experience.