Today’s leading retailers and e-commerce companies are faced with many IT challenges, including the increasing demand to deliver fast, personalized user experiences. At the same time, they have to manage growing volumes of users and data, while reducing costs and time to market. These rising expectations, coupled with competitive pressures in the market, are driving the need to re-platform their existing applications.
One such example is global technology leader, Rakuten Group. Originally founded as an online marketplace, Rakuten has expanded to offer services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications to 1.8 billion members around the world and operates in 30 countries and regions.
Modernizing services while reducing complexity and cost
Rakuten Ichiba, Rakuten’s flagship e-commerce platform, shapes online shopping with its cash back, deals and rewards offerings. As the Ichiba marketplace continues to grow, advertising has become a crucial tool for sellers aiming to capture the attention of customers. To help merchants and manufacturers in achieving their promotions objectives, Rakuten offers a range of ad services that rely on vast real-time data, including accurate shop and item information.
Managing these large datasets required a database that could provide high availability, low read latency, and reliable data backups, all while leveraging machine learning technology. Initially built on Oracle RDBMS, Ichiba’s core platform struggled to keep up with the growing array of services, leading to scalability issues and escalating costs. To meet service demands, Rakuten had to deploy additional products that demanded significant resources to manage. To overcome these hurdles, the company sought a more agile, flexible and cost-effective solution, and opted for Couchbase’s NoSQL database for its advertisement systems
Achieving enhanced performance and 20% lower TCO with Couchbase
Since switching to Couchbase, Rakuten achieved nearly 100% availability and improved the system’s resilience. Now, all advertisement services data resides in Couchbase, ensuring data delivery with extremely low latency. Rakuten was also able to slash total cost of ownership by 20% through the elimination of Redis and Aerospike databases, consolidating instead on Couchbase. Fewer databases lowered maintenance costs, reduced code complexity and facilitated smoother upgrades. Presently, the Couchbase supports over 70,000 shops on Ichiba, boasting a catalog of over 475 million items.
With developers collaborating on a single development platform using SQL++, Rakuten is delivering global applications ahead of schedule, despite team members being dispersed across various locations. Additionally, the platform effortlessly handles spikes in traffic, such as Rakuten’s quarterly SuperSale Campaign Events and Shopping Marathons.
The next step on Rakuten’s roadmap is to bring additional data into Couchbase so that everything related to ad delivery is stored together. Additionally, Rakuten aims to migrate to Couchbase Capella™ DBaaS on Google Cloud in the near future.
Read the full Rakuten case study to learn more.
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