One of the largest e-commerce companies in Korea modernises core platforms with NashTech

Industry

Technology

Introduction

NashTech’s designed microservices architecture helps one of the largest eCommerce companies in Korea cut their go-to-market time in half and simplify maintenance and productivity between existing systems.

As one of the largest eCommerce companies in Korea, it operates three online retail platforms: G-Market, Auction, and G9. With Korea’s e-commerce market more than doubling over the past five years and the uptick in online shopping due to the pandemic, they have seen a significant recent surge in growth.

The challenge

While the increase in sales and revenues was welcome, the growth highlighted issues with the company’s legacy eCommerce platform, which had been in place for more than 15 years. Based on a monolithic architecture with a single large application and a single database, the platform was becoming increasingly difficult to develop and maintain. “When business requirements are complex, the code needed to implement them also becomes complex,” says the Leader of Platform Engineering. “With our legacy platform, everything was interdependent, so updating the code in one area often led to unexpected problems in another.”

To enable continued growth and increased development velocity, the company is overhauling its eCommerce platforms, replacing monoliths with a microservices architecture. NashTech and Apache Kafka® serve as the messaging infrastructure for this architecture, enabling low latency communication between decoupled microservices across the enterprise. “When we started to refactor the business based on a microservices architecture, we concluded that Apache Kafka was the best technology to use because of its stability,” says Lee.

The company has already optimised order processing on its Korea G9 eCommerce platform using NashTech and the new microservices architecture. Currently, their team is planning to expand its use of real-time data streaming to accounting and product information use cases. They plan to scale the entire solution horizontally to the Gmarket and Auction e-commerce platforms.

The solution

Simplified maintenance and operations for improved productivity. Using a NashTech-enabled microservices architecture, they significantly reduced dependencies between systems, making them much easier to maintain and operate and increasing overall productivity.

Stable, high-throughput streaming. The e-commerce company can now handle 1 million transactions per second with no data loss. Multi-region clusters ensure full disaster recovery and service stability.

Rapid support. Before NashTech, service disruptions with self-managed Kafka often took more time to resolve than the company wanted. Now, NashTech is always right there to quickly step in and help.

The outcome

Faster time to market. “Using NashTech-designed microservices and electronic design-based applications has allowed us to cut our go-to-market time in half,” says Lee. “NashTech plays a pivotal role in delivering messages between microservices-based applications and connecting all our services as a core foundation.”

The eCommerce company unveiled Gmarket Global in October 2021 and will open Gmarket Main between December 2021 and January 2022. As many modules support purchase orders or transactions, they gradually make them available, and 70% of all purchase order modules are completed. Since the kickoff in May 2021, they have experienced no downtime in delivering or operating services. They only took five months to build an enterprise-grade MSA and EDA platform.

“Although we had some experience running open source, Kafka ourselves, we recognised that we needed a trusted partner to help us resolve issues that we’d encounter with a larger-scale deployment. NashTech had the best-known, verified solution, which was what we wanted for our mission-critical e-commerce platforms.”