Wayfair closes data centers and ends hybrid cloud strategy with Google Cloud migration

Jakub Jirsák – stock.adobe.com

Online home improvement retailer Wayfair has abandoned its hybrid cloud strategy, closing its data centers and moving all of its applications and workloads to Google’s public cloud infrastructure.

The migration involved migrating Wayfair’s entire database, application data storage, computing framework, and data analysis tools to Google Cloud and took 16 months to complete.

Wayfair said the migration involved moving or decommissioning 330,000 CPU cores, 23,000 operating system instances and more than 500 applications, as well as retraining Wayfair employees on how to use these new technologies.

The company also donated data center hardware, made redundant by the move to Rochester Institute of Technology, USA, to support its research efforts.

The project has described Google Cloud as providing the foundation for Wayfair’s overall cloud strategy, designed to enhance the company’s business agility and ability to scale, so the company’s applications and websites can cater to 2400 The needs of thousands of active users who rely on it to buy products for their homes.

This feature is especially important during sales days and high-traffic times, such as leads to Christmas, which often see an increase in the number of visitors their sites and apps have to deal with.

The company said the project will also enable it to leverage Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to enhance its fraud detection and customer outreach activities ,E.g.

In the latter case, the company is taking steps to better personalize the shopping experience for Wayfair customers, using machine learning to drive sales.

Fiona Wayfair CTO Tan said Google’s cloud technology will play a “key role” in its overall innovation strategy in the coming years, while ensuring it can respond quickly to customers’ changing tastes and needs.

“Complete migration of our data center operations to Google Cloud is an important part of ensuring Wayfair’s long-term competitiveness and resiliency. Through this partnership, we are better able to handle burst traffic , giving our engineers more autonomy and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a better shopping experience for our customers,” Tan added.

Carrie Tharp, vice president of retail and consumer solutions for Google Cloud, said retailers are increasingly seeing the positive impact that operating a “data-driven” IT setup can have on their sales.

“Wayfair is at the forefront of retail and at every stage of our partnership we’ve seen them embrace new technology and bold technological endeavors that ultimately delight with a better shopping experience client.”

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