This week we learn about how Mercari is handling migrating from an on-prem monolithic infrastructure to cloud microservices architecture with GKE. Terry and Taichi share with Melanie and Mark what drove the decision for the change, the challenges and what the team has learned from the transition. The real value for this change has been about making the platform more scalable as they grow to meet the needs of their millions of daily active users. It’s another great interview we captured out of Google NEXT.

Taichi Nakashima

Taichi is a tech lead for the microservices platform at Mercari. Prior to Mercari, he was a backend engineer at Rakuten, building internal Platform as a Service. Mercari chose microservice architecture as their next development platform, and built two teams to proceed with the migration. One is the microservice platform team that is building a platform that can deploy any microservices, and the other is the microservice development team that are focusing on migrating the current monolithic API to microservices. Mercari use GKE as a platform and GCP as the main infrastructure for microservices.

Tonghui (Terry) Li

Tonghui joined Mercari in April 2018 and is responsible for migrating the monolithic backend API to a microservice architecture. Prior to Mercari, he was a tech lead of Indeed, working on different components of the job search engine including Title Normalization, Location system, Job Search API, and more.

Cool things of the week

• How to call the Cloud AutoML API from a web app site
  • GCPPodcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig site
• Who is this street artist? Building a graffiti artist classifier using AutoML blog
• Datastore Transactions, Batches and Perf! video and twitter
• Deploy only what you trust: introducing Binary Authorization for Google Kubernetes Engine blog

Interview

• Mercari site
• Microservices on GKE at Mercari site
• Continuous Delivery for Microservices with Spinnaker at Mercari site
• Microservices site
• GKE site
• Terraform site
• Spinnaker site
• GKE On-Prem site
  • GKE On-Prem - Managing Across Hybrid IT Environments with Open Architectures (Cloud Next ‘18) video
• Mercari on GitHub site
• BigQuery site
• Mercari Engineering Blog blog
• kubectl site
• Google Cloud AutoML site

Photo credit: Taichi Nakashima

Question of the week

How do I use my existing identity management system with Google Cloud Platform? site and blog

Where can you find us next?

Mark is at Pax Dev and Pax West. Find him and say hi.

In September, Mark will be at Tokyo NEXT and Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba. You can find both of us at Strangeloop.