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Case Study

How Earny saves online shoppers thousands with technology-driven shopping

Client
Earny
Earny
Industries
E-Commerce, Technology
Technologies
Data Analytics, Databases, Kubernetes
Products & Services
Cloud Migration
Region
North America, USA
Country
United States

Meet Earny

Consumer demand for online shopping continues to skyrocket. In 2019 alone, eMarketer reported more than $25 trillion would be spent on retail goods globally, a figure that is set to jump even higher in 2020. As more shoppers embrace the internet to find the right products at the right price, more service providers are stepping up to help consumers save money.

Earny is a great example of a company bridging the world between consumers and sellers, offering an app that helps consumers save money on their purchases. The company conducted research ahead of its app launch and found that a lack of online shopping savvy translated to $50 billion in missed savings opportunities.

“We started Earny a few years ago with the mission to help people make sure they never spend more than they have to,” says Oded Vakrat, Chief Executive Officer of Earny. “It began with automating price protection, which reimburses consumers when products they bought had price reductions after their purchase, driving tens of millions of dollars back into their pockets. Since then, we’ve expanded significantly.”

The challenge

After experiencing severe outages at peak times within its legacy cloud infrastructure, as well as issues pertaining to scale, Earny decided to migrate its platform to Google Cloud with the help of partner DoiT International.

The right infrastructure and production support

In the world of retail, peak shopping days are among the most important to have all systems running properly. While on its legacy cloud environment, the company experienced several outages on consecutive Black Fridays, leading to poor customer engagement and lost opportunities for Earny and its customers. On top of this, the company had issues with production directly related to a lack of support.

“Our engineers complained constantly about the legacy infrastructure,” says Ilan Zerbib, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Earny. “After completing our due diligence, we realized Google Cloud would provide the scalable, flexible environment we needed, and that our engineers would get incredible support from DoiT. Those were the biggest drivers of our decision to migrate.”

The solution

Google Cloud offered a more cost-efficient, robust set of infrastructure solutions, and DoiT stepped in to help complete the migration and provide ongoing support. This contrasted with the company’s previous experience, where Earny engineers struggled to get the right people on the phone when problems arose.

“We need to surround ourselves with the right people every step of the way to succeed,” says Oded. “In Google Cloud and DoiT, we found the perfect partners to innovate with.”

Database and VM migration improves performance

The first and most complex project carried out by Earny and DoiT was migrating its massive databases from an SQL server onto Google Cloud. This demanded precise planning, as the system was mission-critical. DoiT assisted by helping to re-define and design data models and flow designs to seamlessly migrate it onto Cloud Spanner.

“DoiT was integral to this project’s success, given the complexity of our systems and huge volume of data,” says Ilan. “We had many meetings between our engineering teams, which helped streamline implementation a lot. Today all of our user data runs on Cloud Spanner, and we have not had a single problem or outage.” With this migration came the ability to properly support all three million of Earny’s customers and create the right foundation to scale to the next ten million in the future. The more cost-effective and tailored Google Cloud solutions also helped the company overcome some of the technology debt it accumulated in its early years.

The result

After completing the first migration successfully, Earny decided to migrate its virtual machines from a monolithic architecture to microservices based in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This change also helped to generate cost savings because it enables the company to quickly scale use up or down based on demands.

“Microservices on GKE was a huge win for us,” says Ilan. “We have hundreds of clients and services, and now our engineers can work on individual pieces without impacting our overall system. In addition, the flexibility to automatically scale systems down during low-traffic times saved us a lot of money right from the start.”

Scaling to save consumers even more money online

The combination of Cloud Spanner and GKE, along with DoiT’s continued support, allows Earny to continue innovating through new feature development and on-the-fly system adjustments. As a startup supporting millions of customers, Earny processes billions of transactions and submits hundreds of thousands of claims on behalf of customers every day. As a result, system stability and flexibility are crucial.

“We all sleep better at night since migrating to Google Cloud with DoiT’s support,” says Oded. “It wasn’t easy to postpone our company roadmap by months to complete this migration, but we couldn’t be happier with the results. Everything is stable, reliable, and consistent. We’re now in an even much better position to continue innovating.”

With a solid technology platform in place, Earny can enable more consumers to save on online purchases. The migration also proved to be well-timed, as more people are shopping online due to the global pandemic. Thanks to the collaboration across Earny, DoiT, and Google Cloud teams, the company has scaled easily to handle the greater demands.

What's next?

“We want to be the biggest player in the online shopping space, helping consumers use technology to make sure they save money in every possible way,” says Oded. “Five years from now, we want to see millions of shoppers using our app to save millions of dollars for a better financial future. And we want to do it with DoiT and Google Cloud.”

Ilan Zerbib, Founder and Chief Technology Officer
“DoiT was integral to this project’s success, given the complexity of our systems and huge volume of data. We had many meetings between our engineering teams, which helped streamline implementation a lot. Today all of our user data runs on Cloud Spanner, and we have not had a single problem or outage.”

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