sahibinden.com delivers reliable retail services faster with Red Hat OpenShift

To maintain its market-leading position against competition from start-ups and global retailers, Turkish classified listing and e-commerce platform, sahibinden.com, decided to transform its IT infrastructure and approach to application development. As part of the project, the company has migrated 3,000 virtual machines (VMs) to containers within Red Hat OpenShift and is taking advantage of a range of integrated tools to simplify and automate application development and deployment. With an active-active datacenter environment and new DevOps workflows, sahibinden.com has increased system availability, improved developer productivity and time to market, and raised its reputation for technology innovation.

Benefits:

• Optimized application development and deployment with tools for automation and self-service
• Improved developer experience to increase talent attraction and retention
• Increased system availability and scalability with active-active datacenter configuration

Turkish classified listing and e-commerce platform, sahibinden.com, is one of Turkey’s most visited websites, with 62.8 million active users, 519.3 million visits, and 6 million active advertisements as of July 2023. It is currently the fourth largest online classifieds platform worldwide.

To stay ahead of competition from both experienced global retailers and startups, sahibinden.com has a strong focus on delivering innovative services and user experiences at the pace of demand. To help maintain its market position, the company decided to modernize both its IT architecture and its approach to application development.

Previously, the company had operated 2 datacenters, working in active-passive mode. If 1 datacenter experienced an outage, there was a delay before the standby datacenter could take over any workloads. Additionally, the company’s IT infrastructure struggled to scale to accommodate seasonal or other spikes in traffic.

sahibinden.com decided to transition to an active-active approach to improve availability and migrate all its virtual machines to a containerized environment, modernizing application development and simplifying management. “We wanted to establish a microservices development environment to accelerate our time to market, improve our resilience, and simplify infrastructure management,” said Gökhan Ergül, Chief Technology Officer, sahibinden.com.

After completing a request for proposal (RFP) process, sahibinden.com decided to adopt Red Hat OpenShift, running in an on-premise private cloud, as the foundation for its new application platform powered by Kubernetes.

“We knew Kubernetes was the leading container technology. We wanted to avoid vendor lock-in with an open source solution, but we have always put a great deal of focus on operational security and efficiency,” said Ergül. “Red Hat OpenShift is the clear leader in enterprise Kubernetes. And while the virtualization market leaders can run Kubernetes on their virtualized infrastructure, only Red Hat OpenShift can run our whole virtualization environment within a single application platform.”

Red Hat OpenShift provides a stable, security-focused application platform and comprehensive automation for development innovation across hybrid IT environments. The platform allows teams to work with their choice of supported languages, frameworks, and databases to accelerate development and deployment.

sahibinden.com completed the first phase of its project in 2021, which involved transforming its primary on-premise datacenter in Ankara. Since then, the company has gone on to modernize its secondary datacenter in Istanbul and is currently in phase 3 of its transformation. This final stage includes establishing a self-service approach to application development while refactoring legacy applications to containers and developing microservices-based applications.

As part of the project, sahibinden.com migrated 3,000 VMs to Red Hat OpenShift. Teams at sahibinden.com worked closely with Red Hat Consulting to design and provision the new, container-based architecture and gained expertise from the ongoing collaboration.

“Red Hat Consulting played a crucial role in our success. Their experts worked alongside our team for 12-hour days over 3 weeks to gain hands-on experience and build skills with on-the-job training,” said Ergül.

Optimized application development and deployment with tools for automation and self-service

sahibinden.com now has an ongoing focus on increasing efficiency, automation, and self-service in application development. For example, using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, sahibinden.com’s teams can manage both VMs and containers on a single platform. Developers can run virtual machines alongside containers.

The company has also streamlined the software development lifecycle with Red Hat OpenShift’s integrated tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines automates deployments across a multi-cloud environment, while Red Hat OpenShift GitOps provides the workflows to integrate Git repositories, CI/CD tools, and Kubernetes.

Using Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, an included feature in the platform, sahibinden.com is now able to monitor and manage its microservices-based environment more efficiently. It has migrated 800-plus load balancers and routing rules to the tool. “Leveraging our new approach, we have successfully modernized and migrated our main application for web clients and API gateway for mobile applications to the new platform,” said Ergül.

Improved developer experience to increase talent attraction and retention

With a modern application platform and DevOps approach, sahibinden.com has increased application quality and development efficiency. For example, using Red Hat OpenShift components for CI/CD eliminates previously manual management and provisioning tasks. Similarly, OpenShift Service Mesh boosts developer productivity with integrated communications policies, while providing control and visibility of the traffic flow between services to enable rapid detection and resolution of issues.

“Using our open source tools and agile approach, our DevOps teams can spend more time building and delivering innovative services and features, rather than time-consuming infrastructure management tasks,” said Ergül. “This helps us attract and retain the talent we need to create competitive services for our business.”

Increased system availability and scalability with active-active datacenter configuration

Demand for sahibinden.com’s platform continues to grow as ever more people post advertisements and purchase goods and services via the online marketplace. With the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of the company’s infrastructure and development environment, sahibinden.com can continue to meet the needs of its users by rapidly bringing to market innovative and highly available cloud-native applications.

Running an active-active datacenter environment improves service availability and reliability, so sahibinden.com can focus on innovation, rather than just maintaining operations. In the event of an incident, the company can instantly switch its workloads to its alternative datacenter. And with access to on-demand cloud resources, sahibinden.com can easily scale to meet peak traffic demands, such as during holiday shopping times.

Although sahibinden.com has completed the successful migration of its datacenters and started to implement more efficient DevOps processes, it recognizes that its journey is far from over. In 2023, the company renewed its Red Hat contract for another 3 years and is currently exploring Red Hat OpenShift AI, a flexible, scalable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform to further enhance its self-service model for development and training.

“Red Hat technology stands out from the competition in its ability to run integrated, streamlined virtual machine and container workloads. These capabilities help us build and deliver valuable software faster,” said Ergül. “It also continually offers new components that will help us innovate. We are excited to see what the future brings as we continue to modernize our infrastructure and development approaches.”