Flipkart sets up data centres to handle growing mobile first traffic

By

Maverick Martins

Published
Oct 4, 2016

India’s largest etailer Flipkart is setting up its own data centres in Mumbai and Chennai, to manage traffic from its 100 million and growing user base, according to a Business Standard report.

The Indian e-commerce giant's move to store its applications and data on its own servers - built from the ground up to handle its unique needs, comes at a time when global firms Microsoft, Google and Amazon look at India as the next battleground for providing cloud services.

Most of Flipkart's traffic comes from mobile users, while the larger giants built their cloud services for Western enterprises and personal computers. Only in the last few years has there been a massive shift towards mobile computing.

"We have unleashed quite a bit of computing power for our system to scale and that's been one big initiative that just concluded a month ago. On the back of that we've redeployed our services and have done a fair bit of performance optimisation," said Ravi Garikipati, head of engineering at Flipkart.
 
The rollout of Flipkart's own data centres came ahead of this year's Big Billion Days sale that kicked off on October 2 as the company scrambled to beef up its tech platform to handle the immense traffic and order loads. In the first 12 hours of the sale itself, Flipkart and its fashion subsidiary Myntra said they received over 2.25 million orders.
 
Amazon, the big daddy of online commerce, began renting out storage and compute services to third parties in 2006 in order to boost earnings from its underutilised data centres. The concept mushroomed into Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is today one of the biggest profit drivers for the US-based firm.
 
Flipkart has customized its data centres to suit its own technology stack. The firm sees millions of customers browse products on its platform each day, while the increasing number of products it sells also takes up a larger digital footprint.
 
"We actually worked closely with our partner Intel to ensure they understand our application requirements, and then they along with our platform integrators defined our specifications. Post that we worked with OEM vendors that built the hardware to our custom specification," added Garikipati.