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Customer Story

Gumtree Migrates Its Entire Data Infrastructure in a Record Time of 6 Months

The famous online classifieds site partners with Xebia to migrate its data infrastructure to Google Cloud after a change in ownership

Related Services
GCP, Pubsub, Bigquery, BigTable, Vertex AI, Cloud Run

Industry
E-commerce

Company
Xebia Data

Founded in 2000, Gumtree was the first online classifieds platform in the UK, and it’s still one of the leading sites in the country. Previously a part of eBay Classifieds Group, they are now privately owned. 

Its rigorous categorization and refined search engine allows visitors to find the products and services they’re looking for, from jobs to cars and properties. Gumtree focuses on making “Good Finds” happen, encouraging connection and minimizing waste of resources all over the UK. Today, the platform receives 9.2 million visitors every month and hosts more 2.2 million live listings.
Why
As part of its sale agreement from eBay and Adevinta, Gumtree had to migrate its data services and products in just six months. Otherwise, millions of users would lose access to the platform
What
Gumtree’s platform was deeply integrated with eBay technology. Following its sale from eBay, and subsequently Adevinta, Gumtree worked closely with Xebia, to create a new Google Cloud-based platform to host their data and ML services
How
Gumtree and Xebia put together a team of data scientists and implemented a tailored-to-fit Xebia Base MLOps platform hosted on Google Cloud

Time to Leverage Data

The sale of eBay Classifieds Group to Adevinta (a European online classifieds leader) couldn’t include Gumtree, because that would have made the classifieds market in the UK uncompetitive. That meant Gumtree had just one year to find new ownership, regroup its departments and set up all its data products. Most of Gumtree’s main features like the seller-buyer chat or the dominant category service were owned by the eBay Classifieds Group. All these services had to be reconfigured for the site to keep working properly. Millions of users depended on it. 
We were very impressed with the Xebia Data consultants. They were always professional and willing to help with technical aspects at which we weren’t quite mature yet. When they left at the end of the project, everyone in the team was asking, ‘so, when are we having them back?’  
Gumtree Logo-2
Agathe Merat Head of Delivery at Gumtree

A Successful Migration

Xebia Data helped Gumtree create a department of data scientists and developers. Professionals from the two companies started the migration of Gumtree’s data services with the help of some external developing muscle. 

This process wasn’t a simple “lift and shift” of the services. Xebia consultants realized that, since Gumtree was now independent from a much bigger conglomerate, many of the data services could be simplified and tailored to a smaller company. The technical separation from its previous owners presented Gumtree with the opportunity to improve its processes through MLOps, hence reducing the number of people to maintain the platform from 10 to 3.

By the end of 2022, the deadline to complete the migration, all services were up to speed and Gumtree was able to keep serving its users seamlessly. Some of the work Xebia and Gumtree did together included:

  • Setting up Google Vertex AI, including a full MLOps infrastructure and deployment pipeline, to build the dominant category service, which Gumtree uses to perform search recommendations. 
  • Using Google Pub/Sub and Dataflow to create an event-based streaming ingestion system, which tracks thousands of user interactions every second.
  • Leveraging Google Bigtable and Dataflow to implement the viewer count on ads pages.

 

Gumtree is the first site for free classifieds ads in the UK

The Future of Gumtree’s Data

Through its successful collaboration with Xebia, Gumtree migrated all their data services to a new platform that they now own and can build upon. This challenging project made the company’s data products more robust and efficient. Today, they have a solid foundation that allows them to keep their website running smoothly and to optimize their cloud data services. 

The Xebia Base MLOps Platform is a turn-key solution that offers a fast implementation and operationalization of your data products. For more information about this tailored-to-fit solution, please visit the Xebia Base MLOps Platform page.

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