OLX Case Study

India is among the top growth markets for OLX Autos globally. The company has a highly innovative technology team running its Panamera classifieds marketplace, which is active in 12 countries, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. To unlock maximum value for its users, OLX Autos is committed to investing in its people and the latest technology.

In 2018, OLX Autos experienced an outage on its site when its internal certificates for OpenShift containerization software expired. The business was using OpenShift version 3.5 to manage its infrastructure and to deploy applications on its site running in Docker containers. As part of the company’s commitment to support customers with a smooth experience, engineers quickly identified the issue and rolled out new certificates immediately. However, they had to invest a significant amount of time to restore the website. The team concluded that their staging environment was unstable due to issues with the control panel on OpenShift and began seeking ways to modernize their technology stack.

Abhishek Tomar, infrastructure head at OLX Autos, says, “Buyers and sellers could not search, see new ads, or create new listings during the outage. We realized that even if we experienced just one crash a year, it would still be better to offload the control and management plane to AWS. Our customers were not able to access our marketplace in the several hours that were spent resolving the issue, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.”

The AWS team presented a roadmap for potential new Panamera features using Amazon EKS in addition to other AWS services. OLX Autos then started building an Amazon EKS cluster and migrating selected workloads from OpenShift, with the rollout completed in just a few weeks. OLX Autos has now migrated all 124 of its microservices to Amazon EKS, which has improved efficiency and scalability while unlocking cost savings.

With the AWS migration, the company has removed Puppet from its architecture and offloaded container management to AWS. By running on Amazon EKS, the OLX Autos website benefits from improved performance and scalability, and engineers can reallocate their time to higher value-added tasks.

OLX Autos has also benefited from the AWS container network interface (CNI) plug-in, which was blocked with its previous OpenShift configuration. The CNI plug-in has not only improved application latency, but OLX Autos also expects to save at least 10 percent on its overall monthly AWS bill with more efficient applications. Tomar says, “Using AWS has kept our environment running in a stable manner in the most cost-optimized way.”

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) provide a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.

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