KAUCHE: Improving online shopping using container development
About KAUCHE
KAUCHE was launched in September 2020 by X Asia Co., Ltd. The company name was changed to KAUCHE Co., Ltd. in May 2022. KAUCHE's vision is to "create the world's most enjoyable shopping experience," and the platform allows people to shop in groups with friends and family online, allowing people to have fun together while saving money. In May 2022, KAUCHE saw its app downloads exceed 700,000, an increase of 1,200% of its gross merchandise value (GMV) compared to the same month in the year before. By May 2023, the number of downloads had exceeded 1.5 million.
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Contact usTo realize its vision of bringing the fun offline shopping experience online, KAUCHE developed its back-end services centered around container development for agility and scale.
Google Cloud results
- Scales containers automatically with Cloud Run
- Manages large-scale relational databases with ease with Firestore and Spanner
- Improves productivity and helps realize company vision with Google Cloud
Supports 1.5 million downloads with Cloud Run
Today's ecommerce landscape focuses on delivering products quickly, cheaply and efficiently. Alongside the challenge of reducing waste, many businesses are unable to replicate the joys of shopping with friends and family online. Offline shopping allows people to window shop with someone else, making the shopping process enjoyable. Through offline shopping, people get to experience simple human interaction, such as receiving recommendations from staff or joining the excitement of a sale with other shoppers.
The concept behind KAUCHE is to bring this fun shopping experience online. "KAUCHE is a service where you can't buy products by yourself. We provide an online experience where you can enjoy shopping for products at a great value while having fun with your friends. Customers introduce their family and friends to us. By incorporating a viral element, sellers can reduce advertising costs and offer discounts. As a result, buyers can purchase the products they want at a lower price, which is beneficial for buyers, and sellers,” says Yuki Ito, architect at KAUCHE.
Launched in September 2020, the system development behind KAUCHE began in July of the same year, with the app released within a short period of about two months.
“Startups have limited budgets, talents, and resources for development, so speed to develop new services is crucial,” says Ito. “We need to act quickly and make sure to launch products when customers are looking for them.”
After considering several cloud services, KAUCHE decided to adopt container development based on Cloud Run. "We wanted to develop services centered around container development. This is because the apps could be independently managed with ease and through isolation and virtualization using containers. Portability was another reason we chose this," says Ito.
For container development, there were two options. Cloud Run or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Ito explained why he chose Cloud Run. "Cloud Run was attractive because it was a managed execution environment for containers, allowing us to run containers as a fully managed platform. Moreover, Google is a leading company in container development, being a developer of Borg, the predecessor of Kubernetes. While GKE can easily manage cluster configurations such as cloud computing, scaling, and security due to the release of GKE Autopilot, Cloud Run is also easier to manage as it's serverless."
"Google App Engine was also a great alternative, but we decided that a service that could easily be deployed within containers would be better, so we chose Cloud Run. A few years later, as KAUCHE expands our business and back-end operations get more complicated, we may migrate to GKE. Developing based on containers means being able to migrate to GKE by simply changing the deployment location," says Ito.
"We launched on a much simpler platform that was also fairly easy to set up. However, as we grew as a company, we needed a solution that could support the traffic coming through, as well as something that would enable us to scale. We found Google Cloud to be the ideal solution for that."
—Yuki Ito, Architect at KAUCHEManaging a service with 1.5 million downloads with Cloud Run
There are two points to take note of when building a system based on Google Cloud. The first is to run everything on Cloud Run as much as possible. The basic system configuration consists of an application server written in the Go language and deployed to Cloud Run. In addition, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks and other tools are used to synchronize the heavy processing such as push notifications when a shared purchase is completed. At the same time, Cloud Scheduler is used for batch processing.
The other is to manage everything as declaratively as possible. Although it is possible to perform implicit programming, such as starting Cloud Functions internally when something triggers, the team would define declarative processing in gRPC, including batch processing. Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, Cloud Logging and other tools are used for system monitoring and service level agreement (SLA) monitoring, while Firestore and Spanner are used for databases. BigQuery is used for its data warehouse and Looker for its business intelligence tools for analyzing business metrics, while using them to improve and enhance our services.
"The biggest advantage of Google Cloud is that it's hands-off,” says Ito. "You have almost zero compute resources to manage, and you can rely on Cloud Run to scale your containers. It's a convenient service for building infrastructure and applications. One advantage is that we have a complete set of tools, and by completing all functions on Google Cloud, we were able to complete everything from infrastructure construction to application implementation in two months."
Ito also likes the database's ease of use. "Managing a large-scale relational database requires a specialist called a database administrator, but Firestore and Spanner can be operated without specialized knowledge of databases. For example, when KAUCHE is advertised on television, traffic spikes occur, but if you set the number of nodes in advance, you can scale without limit according to the amount of traffic. With Google Cloud, we were able to develop and operate the service with just a few people. The platform team currently has two people, and I am the only member involved in site reliability engineering, but with these people, we are operating a service with 1.5 million downloads," Ito says.
"The biggest advantage of Google Cloud is that it's hands-off,” says Ito. “You have almost zero compute resources to manage, and you can rely on Cloud Run to scale your containers. It's a convenient service for building infrastructure and applications.”
—Yuki Ito, Architect at KAUCHEDelivering recommendations and searches with Vertex AI Pipelines
Currently, KAUCHE is implementing a recommendation feature with Vertex AI Pipelines. To this end, it is looking to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services by Google Cloud, which will help KAUCHE look for the right products, including in recommendation and search functions.
KAUCHE is also excited about the Google Cloud Operations Suite, which includes products for monitoring, troubleshooting, and operating large-scale services. "How can we create dashboards to achieve service level indicators and service level objectives, while creating toolsets to improve observability and reliability with AI/ML services? Moving forward, the biggest point will be how easily container-based development, deployment, and scaling can be achieved with Google Cloud," says Ito.
"KAUCHE aims to be an autonomous organization where employees enjoy the working environment and maximize their output. As an organization that enjoys making things, we are committed to our corporate vision of "creating the most enjoyable shopping experience in the world". To take on even more new challenges in the future, we are looking for people who can constantly catch up on new technologies and take on challenges autonomously," Ito adds. "Google Cloud has a number of technologies that will improve productivity, including container infrastructure. We look forward to not only providing a high-quality infrastructure development environment but also relying on a wide range of support to realize our vision."
Google Cloud has a number of technologies that will improve productivity, including container infrastructure. We look forward to not only providing a high-quality infrastructure development environment but also relying on a wide range of support to realize our vision.
—Yuki Ito, Architect at KAUCHETell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About KAUCHE
KAUCHE was launched in September 2020 by X Asia Co., Ltd. The company name was changed to KAUCHE Co., Ltd. in May 2022. KAUCHE's vision is to "create the world's most enjoyable shopping experience," and the platform allows people to shop in groups with friends and family online, allowing people to have fun together while saving money. In May 2022, KAUCHE saw its app downloads exceed 700,000, an increase of 1,200% of its gross merchandise value (GMV) compared to the same month in the year before. By May 2023, the number of downloads had exceeded 1.5 million.