As a subsidiary of the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Nirmit Bharat's mission is to create an open and inclusive digital commerce ecosystem for small businesses, farmers, and artisans across India. Through its DigiHaat app, Nirmit Bharat makes the ONDC network accessible to local sellers and artisans, helping them reach more customers nationwide.

Maintaining a stable and reliable platform was a challenge, especially during festive deals that caused sudden traffic spikes. With limited managed services and auto-scaling capabilities, engineers had to scale the infrastructure manually, leading to high latency and the risk of dropped user requests.

Instead of being focused on developing new features, the engineering team had to spend up to one and a half days every week just managing the infrastructure.

Nirmit Bharat migrated its platform to Google Cloud, with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in Autopilot mode as the cornerstone of its new architecture. The self-managed environment automatically handles the scaling and resources of its services, immediately freeing the team to focus on innovation instead.

This shift resulted in a 30% increase in efficiency for the engineering team. With this newfound time, engineers tackled a high-impact, user-facing project that had been previously delayed: enhancing the DigiHaat app's search functionality. This dedicated work led to a 50% reduction in search latency for users, meaning they now get the results they're looking for two times faster.

To support the platform's transactional reliability, the team uses Cloud SQL to manage all business-critical data, including user profiles, orders, and payment information, which has helped reduce transaction drop rates to under 1%.