About Trade Me
For 21 years, Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest online auction and classifieds website, has been the platform connecting Kiwis to buy and sell goods online. From washing machines to cars, jobs, homes and everything in between, Trade Me has it. The iconic New Zealand brand has seen a lot of change during this time, constantly evolving to meet the needs of Kiwis and Kiwi businesses.
The Challenge
As a pure-play online business, having the best technology has always been mission critical to Trade Me so it can effectively serve its millions of members. While Trade Me has dabbled with the cloud for years, hosting a small number of workloads and managing data analytics, it remained largely on-premises. After a review of its systems, Trade Me decided to migrate all systems and applications off their on-premise data centres and move to the cloud.
After a competitive RFP process, Google Cloud was selected as the platform of choice. Trade Me enlisted support from the Google Cloud Professional Services team, who invited Sourced Group to provide additional expertise and guidance. Trade Me’s Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ragone recognises the value that cloud will bring to their customers.
We need to solve problems for Kiwis and Kiwi businesses faster than ever before. Moving to the cloud will enable us to improve our speed to customer value and that’s really exciting for us and our customers.
Paolo Ragone
Trade Me Chief Technology Office
Kapua – Māori for Cloud
Having experienced Sourced Group’s expertise with other clients on Google Cloud, Google’s Professional Services team invited Sourced to join them in supporting Trade Me’s migration of two critical customer-facing applications and one internal facing application.
Working alongside the Kapua team, Sourced Group defined the operational elements of moving these applications to cloud, taking into account how to migrate without significant downtime, and the seamless deployment of the application to production. To leverage Google Cloud native services, Trade Me decided to completely modernise applications, where appropriate, by containerising and running them on Kubernetes in a microservices architecture. This provided Trade Me’s team with the benefits of high velocity and fast deployment with the release of new versions and the ability to update parts of the data without affecting the rest of the stack.
The Results
Reusable Deployment Patterns
Developing reusable patterns and best practices are the key to success when deploying new applications. Not only do these patterns provide Trade Me with a safe environment to deploy from, as they replicate the secure approach easily, but it also allows the development of custom parts of the code to suit the requirement of challenging infrastructure applications.
Learning and Enablement
Building cloud capabilities and understanding of cloud governance was critical to the success of Trade Me’s project. Sourced Group and Google were embedded in the Kapua team, which enabled Trade Me to leverage their expertise and gain support in their development and understanding of cloud infrastructure. Setting up a cloud platform and migrating critical workloads is no easy feat and is sometimes full of surprises; that is why providing Trade Me’s team with a safe environment for them to grow, learn and take an agile approach, was of paramount importance to promote innovation holistically within the organisation.
Ravi Nair is a Senior Consultant with Sourced Group based in Melbourne, Australia. He focuses on cloud infrastructure automation for secure and highly regulated environments. Ravi has over seven years of cloud experience and has worked on projects across the globe with Sourced.
