Oda: Leveraging technology to change the face of grocery retail in Europe
About Oda
Founded in 2013, Oda is Norway's leading online food retailer. Its goal is to create the world's most effective retail system, to offer people more space for their life by providing convenient same-day home delivery with prices as low as discount stores and twice the selection. Valued at over $1 billion, it's one of the fastest growing companies in Europe.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usTo drive its expansion across Europe while supporting its efforts to build the most effective retail system in the world, online grocery store Oda moves its end-to-end infrastructure to Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Powers innovative AI and data-driven applications by delivering rapid scaling and powerful computational capabilities
- Enables quick and easy deployment of updates, reducing operational burdens and helps to keep applications running efficiently
- Supports development teams to experiment with new services, giving them more autonomy
- Prepares Oda for future international growth, with easy scaling of services using the Google Cloud network across Europe
Supports rapid scaling to 2x demand compared to 2021
In early 2020, Christian Mikalsen, the co-founder and CTO of Oda, Norway's largest online grocery store, faced a complex problem. He needed to find a way to quickly and effectively scale the company's on-premises IT infrastructure to meet its extraordinary customer demand, and, at the same time, he needed to facilitate the business's ambitious growth across Europe. Working with Google Cloud he was able to rapidly and efficiently meet both these challenges.
"Our technology platform is built in-house so we have full control, and are able to constantly iterate and improve every aspect. But in order to support our growth and develop more data-driven services, we decided that moving to Google Cloud was the right choice."
—Christian Mikalsen, CTO and Co-founder, OdaDelivering groceries and unmatched efficiency
Oda's winning formula offers its customers discounter level prices along with a choice of over 7,500 products and reliable same-day or next-day delivery. In order to achieve this combination of affordability and behind-the-scenes efficiency, Oda's strategy has been to fulfill many parts of its business in-house. "The way to deliver on our promise is by building the world's most efficient retail system, using an in-house approach," says Mikalsen. "We work with major suppliers, but we also do a lot of direct sourcing to ensure our fruit and vegetables have a longer shelf life, as well as employing an in-house team of bakers who make fresh pastries and bread every day." Mikalsen adds "This is done to meet existing orders so that we have close to zero waste."
From a technology perspective, this strategy meant Oda chose to build its own proprietary logistics platform, powering its processes using a combination of on-premises servers, alongside open source software and cloud technologies. But recently, it's been moving more and more of its services over to Google Cloud in preparation for its next step: expanding its operations internationally. "Our technology platform is built in-house so we have full control, and are able to constantly iterate and improve every aspect," Mikalsen explains. "But in order to support our growth and develop more data-driven services, we decided that moving to Google Cloud was the right choice."
Feeding power-hungry services with Kubernetes
To optimise customer satisfaction, Oda builds in efficiency at every stage of its supply chain, from its warehouse logistics to customer delivery. That's what enables it to deliver one of the world's most efficient online grocery services, with faster picking times per unit than its competitors. In the initial period of its development, Oda ran its IT systems using on-premises servers, but as it has grown and expanded, its new services require the power of cloud computation on-demand.
"For example, our route-planning system requires large computation CPUs to calculate the most efficient routes for our drivers," says Jonas Myrlund, Director of Engineering at Oda. "Once these computations are complete, the system can be scaled down until it's required again."
So why Google Cloud? Myrlund explains that its strengths were a good fit with Oda's technical requirements and commitment to open-source tools. "When we made the decision to move our significant workloads to the cloud, we were already happy users of Google Workspace," he says. "As Google Cloud offers great support for managed Kubernetes, and has a history of supporting Python, which is the programming language we use for the majority of our applications, that made the initial choice even easier."
More scalable applications, from warehouse to doorstep
In February 2021, Oda moved its biggest applications over to Google Cloud. It now uses Kubernetes, using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), to power its customer-facing applications. These apps are available on iOS and Android, as well as via its web portal in Norway, and enable customers to order products. As a result, Oda can now run all of its logistics systems in the exact same way as it runs its customer-facing systems. With very few exceptions all its software is now run in the same Kubernetes cluster, distributed only across namespaces. Oda’s infrastructure may become more regional, as it expands geographically, but for now it’s able to operate out of a single data center.
For its data pipelines, Oda also uses Google Cloud SQL. "Most of our systems work on the same fundamentals, using GKE and containerized Python applications," says Myrlund. "Even the automation equipment in our fulfillment center is controlled using the same setup."
Using GKE helps the Oda development team to deploy quickly and effectively, reducing the operational burden by automating complex deployment operations. "It's great not to have to script all our changes," says Myrlund. "We can decide what we need to run, and Google Kubernetes Engine figures it out for us."
Its data science teams also appreciate the additional capacity that operating in the cloud offers, using GKE to run Oda's data platform. "We use AI to help our data scientists train models quickly and we host the resulting models on the cloud as part of our general application infrastructure. We use this across all our services, from creating a highly personalized shopping experience to product recommendations and forecasting planned demand in our logistics systems," says Mikalsen.
"It's great not to have to script all our changes. We can decide what we need to run, and Google Kubernetes Engine figures it out for us. Rolling things out is often just a matter of updating the version."
—Jonas Myrlund, Director of Engineering, OdaHandling traffic surges for greater stability
Another advantage of switching to GKE is increased resilience to unexpected surges in traffic. Prior to moving its applications to Google Cloud, Oda had been experiencing periodic DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which flooded its website with requests and destabilized its services. Since switching to GKE, Oda is able to handle such traffic surges without any disruption. "The vast network capacity that Google Cloud supports and the built-in DDoS protection that it offers has been a major win for us, in terms of handling those types of surges," says Myrlund. “And now we are assessing Google Cloud Armor WAF for dealing with more sophisticated cases of DDoS attacks.”
Expanding internationally, with Google Cloud
As Oda now has staging and development clusters which enable its developers to easily test out new services, Myrlund's teams are able to work in more innovative ways. "We're much more scalable than before, and much more flexible than before," he says. "Our teams are more autonomous and can set up experiments and run new instances without asking anyone for permission, which definitely drives innovation."
Switching to the cloud has also made it easier for Oda to support its infrastructure efficiently. "Managing our infrastructure using an Infrastructure as Code approach is really helpful," says Myrlund. "We've eliminated roll-outs that needed significant differences in configuration between fulfilment centres. We can do a lot more with a lot fewer people." Over the past 12 months, it has scaled to meet a doubling in demand without any issues.
Looking to the future and its plans for international growth, Oda is positive about the capacity of Google Cloud to support its growing needs. "As our ambition levels grow and we expand further, the capacity for scaling our applications easily on Google Cloud will definitely be an advantage," says Mikalsen. "We'll be able to deploy our applications close to where they'll be used and reduce any potential latencies, with a highly redundant network infrastructure."
As part of its expansion to Finland and Germany in 2022, Oda is planning to open an engineering hub, in Berlin. "Our product, data and engineering team currently includes a little over 200 people across all disciplines, and will double in 2022," he explains. "We're on the lookout for talented engineers, and using Google Cloud, we're able to place the power into our product developers' hands. That's really going to drive our ability to meet the challenges of expanding to new markets."
"We're much more scalable than before and much more flexible than before. Our teams are more autonomous and can set up experiments and run new instances without asking anyone for permission, which definitely drives innovation."
—Jonas Myrlund, Director of Engineering, OdaTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Oda
Founded in 2013, Oda is Norway's leading online food retailer. Its goal is to create the world's most effective retail system, to offer people more space for their life by providing convenient same-day home delivery with prices as low as discount stores and twice the selection. Valued at over $1 billion, it's one of the fastest growing companies in Europe.