Platforms

This article is co-authored by Trevor LaViale, Machine Learning Solutions Engineer at Arize AI

On Tuesday October 11, 2022 Google announced in a press release that Wayfair completed the migration of all our data center applications and services to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This was a significant move that will provide huge benefits, enabling us to increase agility, technical innovation, and more. You can read the full press release [here].

Wayfair recently celebrated a significant milestone. I’ll give you a hint-it was featured in a roundup of the top 20 innovations from Wayfair’s first two decades of operation. The answer is Wayfair’s new homegrown warehouse management system (WMS), Nexus.

Today, many companies rely heavily on third-party event tracking platforms for collecting event data. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Google Analytics. However, at Wayfair, we chose to go another route, largely eschewing the third-party vendor model to develop our own first-party event tracking platform. It’s called Scribe.

Machine learning (ML) profoundly transformed the digital shopping experience for millions of people worldwide. We’ve seen this at Wayfair, where our teams are continuously delivering intelligent and improved experiences for our customers by integrating ML at every stage of their journey with us. Right now Wayfair is leveraging hundreds of ML applications, which on the outside are improving marketing campaigns, improving the visual merchandising of the products we sell, personalizing product recommendations, enabling high-quality customer service, and more.

At Wayfair, we operate at a massive scale, which has led to tremendous growth over the last decade. During this time, we have increased our traffic more than twenty-fold. To keep pace and fulfil our technology platform needs, scaling has been vital. In fact, it’s been at the core of everything we do throughout this timeframe.

If you've searched on Google or Bing for an item to make your home just right for you, and came across an ad for Wayfair, then you've already experienced our Wayfair Ads Bidding Platform in action! This post dives into the details of why we built this platform, how it evolved, its core building blocks, and plans for future enhancements.

The following blog outlines how the Database team at Wayfair took a principles based approach to transforming how our Engineers interact with and manage their database infrastructure; moving from a largely operational world to one that is characterized by choice and autonomy.