OLX Auto on AWS

OLX stands for OnLine eXchange. It was founded in 2006 at Amsterdam by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford. OLX connects local people to buy, sell, or exchange used products and services enabling people to post a listing through their mobile phone or on the web. It is actively work in 105 countries across the world and supports more than 35 languages.

OLX Auto is India’s leading online consumer-to-consumer marketplace for second-hand cars and motorbikes, mobile phones, household items, jobs and real estate all of these services is called as Panamera. The Panamera online trading marketplace is active in 2 countries. OLX Auto gives access to customers to a larger inventory of cars, avail warranty services,
roadside assistance, and insurance on their pre-owned car purchases.

So let’s talk about why they move to AWS…

The problem faced by OLX

Openshift is a container orchestration engine that provides enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation.
In 2018, OLX Autos experienced an outrage on their site when its internal certificates for OpenShift containerization software expired. The business was using OpenShift 3.5 to manage its infrastructure and to deploy applications on its site running in Docker containers. The company’s commitment was to support customers with a smooth experience, developers figure out the issue and rolled out new certificates quickly but the time is taken to find out the solution was significantly long. The team finds out that their staging environment is quite unstable due to issues with the control panel on OpenShift and began seeking ways to modernize their technology stack.

During the outrage Buyers and sellers were not able to search, see new ads, or create a new listing. They 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

OLX Autos developers need to upgrade the site’s architecture and decided to perform a proof of concept for hosting a self-managed Kubernetes cluster using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service(Amazon EKS).

“We decided on Amazon EKS because it was more flexible than the OpenShift cluster” — Nikhil Sharma, the chapter lead site reliability engineer(SRE) at OLX Autos.

A solution of migrating microservices

OLX Autos starts a discussion with the AWS team a year before migration. First, the team of OLX Autos reached out to AWS Enterprise Support for the best migration techniques. They were parallelly upgrading its operating system, Kubernetes, and Docker versions, and the complexity of its Openshift
architecture. SRE team planned the migration strategy and started moving their staging environment to AWS in January 2020.

AWS presented a roadmap for potential new Panamera features using Amazon EKS in addition to other AWS services. OLX team started building an Amazon cluster and migrating selected workloads from OpenShift, with the rollout completed in just a few weeks. All the microservices were moved to Amazon EKS, which has improved the scalability and efficiency with cost savings.

Services used by OLX Autos

Amazon EKS

EKS is best placed to run your Kubernetes with self-manage services.EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant so you can leverage all benefits of open source tooling from the community. You can also easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to EKS without needing to refactor your code.

Amazon EC2 Reserved instances

RIs can provide a capacity reservation, offering additional confidence in your ability to launch the number of instances you have reserved when you need them.

EC2 RIs provide a discounted hourly rate and an optional capacity reservation for EC2 instances. AWS Billing automatically applies your RI’s discounted rate when attributes of EC2 instance usage match attributes of an active RI.

If an Availability Zone is specified, EC2 reserves capacity matching the attributes of the RI. The capacity reservation of an RI is automatically utilized by running instances matching these attributes.

Managed certificate renewal

AWS Certificate Manager manages the renewal process for the certificates managed in ACM and used with ACM-integrated services, such as Elastic Load Balancing and API Gateway. ACM can automate renewal and deployment of these certificates. With ACM Private CA APIs, ACM enables you to automate creation and renewal of private certificates for on-premises resources, EC2 instances, and IoT devices.

So, these all the above services used by OLX Autos for their problem.

Thanks for reading…..