Auto Trader increases agility with move to Google Cloud Platform
Auto Trader (UK) aims to make the car-buying process easier for consumers, retailers and manufacturers through a range of tools such as detailed reviews of dealerships and cars, valuation tools and integrations with car finance and insurance partners.
Previously known throughout as a print publication, connecting buyers and sellers through regional magazines and classified ads, Head of Infrastructure Russell Warman explains: "Since 2013, we have been a completely digital business, and we are now the UK’s market leader, with 55 million cross-platform visits every month and an audience four times larger than our nearest competitor. We offer about 50 customer-facing applications in total."
Originally deploying its infrastructure from its own data centers via a private cloud, the company soon decided it wanted to improve security and encryption, while creating a more agile architecture for faster innovation. Ultimately, Auto Trader chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Delivering Engineering Lead Karl Stoney says: “we decided to achieve our security goals by migrating from a virtual machine-based infrastructure to a containerized one on a public cloud, as this also enabled us to make system improvements along the way."
This was done by moving Auto Trader’s backend applications to Kubernetes Engine and implementing Istio. Istio, an open-source, transparent service mesh, featured many of the capabilities the company was looking for, enabling high visibility over applications.
This increased visibility has enabled Auto Trader to optimize its CPU allocation, as Stoney says: "Now, we can easily adjust CPU and RAM in GKE, and immediately observe the impact across all performance metrics."
The switch also allowed Auto Trader to utilise automation reduce operational overheads, with a platform that, in Stoney’s words, “automatically provisions, builds, and deploys our developers' applications. It also uses preemptible VMs on Compute Engine for certain preproduction machines.
While migrating, Auto Trader’s has seen a range of benefits, with security improved in numerous ways and efficiency in usage increasing 75 per cent, while the delivery platform allows the product team to take a concept and get an application into production in less than 5 minutes.
