MPB: Focusing on scalability and sustainability with services-oriented architecture
About MPB
Founded in 2011, MPB is transforming the way people buy, sell, and trade used photo and video kit. It is committed to making photography equipment more accessible and affordable, and helping visualize a sustainable future by recirculating and extending the life and creative potential of more than 485,000 items of kit annually for creators around the world.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Searce
Searce is a cloud-native tech consulting firm that empowers clients to modernize their businesses, leveraging Cloud, AI & Analytics.
MPB uses Google Kubernetes Engine to deliver a scalable online marketplace that trades 485,000 items of used photography and videography kits every year across the world.
Google Cloud results
- Scales on demand to serve 1.3 million monthly users and recirculates 485,000 products every year with Google Kubernetes Engine
- Empowers developers to release quickly and often with CICD methodologies and "infrastructure-as-code" culture
- Drives sustainability and with more efficient energy use and the option to use low-carbon Google Cloud data centers
Boosts deployment velocity from 1 to 100+ per quarter
Whether you're a beginning hobbyist or a seasoned professional, finding the right equipment can make all the difference to your photography. Creating high quality images requires a high quality kit, and increasingly buyers are turning to the used market to meet this need.
Founded in the UK in 2011, MPB provides an online platform for buying, selling, and trading used photo and video equipment that is not only easy to navigate, but also adds a level of trust, inventory reliability and quality with professional evaluations, and six-month guarantees.
"Our user base had grown to a point where our existing infrastructure was stretched to its limits. Migrating to Google Cloud meant that we could scale with ease and build a foundation that would sustain the company through our next phase of growth."
—Sophie Davies-Patrick, CTO, MPBSustainability is core to MPB's purposeful mission, with a 100% circular business model that helps reduce waste by keeping 485,000 pieces of working kit in circulation in the last year alone.
"The idea of a circular economy is really important for us," says Sophie Davies-Patrick, CTO at MPB. "The communities that we serve help extend the life of products and we believe that buying used products is a really important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. We want to spread this circular thinking throughout the photography and video communities."
By 2019, MPB had proven itself as a successful, growing business with several rounds of funding and a new office in the United States. The technology infrastructure, however, could not easily sustain the company's rapid expansion. In order to continue growing, MPB migrated to Google Cloud.
"Our user base had grown to a point where our existing infrastructure was stretched to its limits," says Davies-Patrick. "Migrating to Google Cloud meant that we could scale with ease and build a foundation that would sustain the company through our next phase of growth."
Going beyond the limits of bare-metal servers
From its earliest days, MPB ran its primary application, known as MPBx, on a monolithic infrastructure with bare-metal servers. While this setup allowed for a great deal of customization, it put hard limits on scaling and releasing new updates. "We had no autoscaling of any kind with the previous infrastructure," says Mat Robinson, Head of Site Reliability Engineering. "Everything was handmade, hand-tested, and hand-deployed. It took around 75 hours, or two people working for a week, to get a new deployment into production."
Eventually the business hit an inflection point where the technology infrastructure simply could not keep up with demand.
By the end of 2018, MPB had decided to look for a new cloud-based solution that could run Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration technology developed at Google that automates much of the infrastructure management process. "We evaluated the major cloud providers at the time," says Davies-Patrick. "We chose Google Cloud for a combination of reasons. It had the most straightforward solution for Kubernetes, it was cost-effective, and it was developer-friendly."
From migration to replatforming
MPB migrated to Google Cloud in 2019, subsequently teaming up with Searce, a leading Google Cloud partner, for enhanced support. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) formed the backbone of the new infrastructure. "My favorite thing about Google Kubernetes Engine is that it works exactly how you want it to," says Robinson. "It doesn't overwhelm you with options, the integrations are really top notch, and I don't have to waste time managing it. I can just get on with what I need to do."
However, MPB's long-term plans were more ambitious than a simple migration to the cloud. The monolithic legacy application was approaching the end of its usefulness. Once the company had fully migrated to Google Cloud, it began a bold replatforming of its application fully optimized for the services-oriented architecture that GKE provides. Alongside GKE, the new platform leans on Google Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL for database management.
"My favorite thing about Google Kubernetes Engine is that it works exactly how you want it to. It doesn't overwhelm you with options, the integrations are really top notch, and I don't have to waste time managing it. I can just get on with what I need to do."
—Mat Robinson, Head of SRE, MPBMeanwhile, BigQuery fulfills the role of data analytics engine. "We have a lot of complexity within our platform because we deal with used goods, so the same models might be in different conditions," says Davies-Patrick. "BigQuery is a really powerful business analytics solution that helps us understand how price and margin can drive our business. It helps us do more with less."
Improving scalability while driving sustainability
With its new infrastructure and replatformed application, MPB's story has been one of successful, sustainable growth. Since migrating to Google Cloud, the company has grown to 1.3 million monthly active users and, with around 485,000 products recirculated every year, it is the largest platform for used camera equipment in the world.
MPB has not only changed the technology it uses, it has changed the way it works. The move to GKE and the replatforming have allowed the company to build a culture of "infrastructure-as-code" and implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CICD). Developers can now create dynamic feature environments as and when they need them for testing and deploying updates, which has led to much higher levels of productivity and more mature products.
"We used to deploy once a quarter because the risks and overheads were so high, and in the last quarter, we deployed 110 times, sometimes as often as five times a day. That's because we've been able to put really good deployment protocols and automated processes in place thanks to the infrastructure we've built."
—Sophie Davies-Patrick, CTO, MPB"We used to deploy once a quarter because the risks and overheads were so high, and in the last quarter, we deployed over 150 times, sometimes as often as five times a day," says Davies-Patrick. "That's because we've been able to put really good deployment protocols and automated processes in place thanks to the infrastructure we've built."
Since developers can iterate so much faster, MPB's customers benefit from a richer, more mature platform that is also much more reliable than it was on the previous infrastructure.
Thanks to Google Cloud and efficient design, the new platform boasts quicker load times and less data usage for common tasks like obtaining a quote for a particular product. As well as satisfied customers, this translates to energy saved and sustainability gains when scaled across the whole organization. With Google Cloud, MPB is able to choose low-emission data centers with more than 80% carbon free energy consumption.
For MPB, the replatforming is far from over: the company is hard at work making further optimizations to the platform to improve performance for its global user base. Looking ahead, MPB is also keen to experiment with Google's Data Cloud solutions, such as Vertex AI and BigQuery Machine Learning, to gain an extra edge in its pricing strategies. "It's really about continuing the journey we've already started with Google Cloud," says Robinson. "We want to find more services that automate and simplify things for us as much as possible, so we can focus on what's important for our customers."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About MPB
Founded in 2011, MPB is transforming the way people buy, sell, and trade used photo and video kit. It is committed to making photography equipment more accessible and affordable, and helping visualize a sustainable future by recirculating and extending the life and creative potential of more than 485,000 items of kit annually for creators around the world.
About Searce
Searce is a cloud-native tech consulting firm that empowers clients to modernize their businesses, leveraging Cloud, AI & Analytics.