Snapdeal launches Cirrus cloud service
Fri 2 Sep 2016
Snapdeal, one of the top three e-commerce sites in India, has announced the launch of its own private cloud platform, Snapdeal Cirrus.
Snapdeal is the first e-commerce site in India to build a hybrid cloud service using OpenStack. Spanning three data center regions, and comprising a dense architecture of over 100,000 core servers, Cirrus represents one of the largest OpenStack hybrid cloud deployments in the world. It was built and released for use in less than a year.
Snapdeal intends to use Cirrus to manage projected growth in traffic and site usage, as well as to improve speed and security across the site. Better data management using Cirrus will also allow the company to provide personalized shopping experiences for their customers, making the site easier to use across the board. Snapdeal hopes that using a private cloud will improve site performance, and provide cost savings while improving speed and reliability for users.
“Snapdeal was born in the cloud, but public clouds stops being cost efficient after a scale, which became the case for Snapdeal sometime last year. In a short span of 10 months, we have succeeded in building an extremely resilient, scalable and secure solution,” said Rajiv Mangla, CTO of Snapdeal. He added, “We are extremely proud of what our team has achieved — Snapdeal Cirrus is one of the few successful examples globally of a large hybrid cloud built at a scale of public cloud, purely using open source technologies like OpenStack and Ceph.”
The e-commerce market in India is experiencing rapid growth, from $2.3 billion US in 2012 to well over $23 billion this year. Sales are expected to triple by 2020, to over $79 billion. Cirrus is Snapdeal’s answer to managing the explosive projected growth in its traffic over the next few years.
Just this week, Snapdeal also announced a premium service called Snapdeal Gold, which garnered over 100,000 members in the first 24 hours after launch. Snapdeal Gold, much like Amazon Prime, provides members with free shipping and an extended return period, as well as a four-day maximum delivery assurance. Unlike Amazon Prime, however, there is no charge for the upgrade. Snapdeal Gold is a free service upgrade available to all visitors to the site.
Snapdeal also plans to improve customer experience by opening six new distribution centers in India – three in Delhi-NCR, and one each in Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. Adding a million square feet of additional distribution centers will help to reduce delivery time and provide additional services to sellers.
