Leroy Merlin Leverages Traefik's API Gateway to Power Leading European Retail Platform
Traefik's API Gateway offers unparalleled performance and simplicity for deploying Kubernetes Ingress at scale.
About Adeo and Leroy Merlin
Adeo is a platform of brands dedicated to supporting homes. It includes Leroy Merlin, a French headquartered home improvement and gardening retailer with over 26,000 employees. Leroy Merlin’s business centers on DIY, building, gardening, sanitary equipment, renewable energy, and interior decoration. With over 290 stores in 12 countries, Leroy Merlin relies on a modernized, cloud native infrastructure to deliver its products and services.
Overview
Adeo divides its Information Technology into four major platforms that work together to provide localized IT services to all countries in which they operate. The Customer and Commerce Digital Platform maintains Leroy Merlin’s various websites, mobile applications, marketplace, payment systems, and customer data management systems. The Product Digital Platform is responsible for product categories, catalog, and supplier management. The Supply Chain Digital Platform carries products to the finish line. These platforms build applications above and provision resources through a cloud native infrastructure built and operated by the Global Tech & Data Platform.
For decades, Leroy Merlin’s business strategy was centered on DIY stores. With so many aspects of human life shifting online, they sought to extend their digital strategy. In 2020, Leroy Merlin scaled their online activities. The Cloud Containers team, managed by Maxime Triqueneaux (Cloud Product Manager), evolved their Kubernetes platform to deliver a highly performant and scalable infrastructure. Maxime and his team worked with the Customer and Commerce Digital Platform to create a new Kubernetes platform.
Challenges
To offer customers a better experience, the Cloud Containers team looked to reduce costs, increase the quality of service, and gain better control over the platform. Leroy Merlin was growing their online services at a rapid pace, and the existing platform had reached its limits. With struggling performance and unstable latency, the platform was tricky to manage and time-consuming to pinpoint problems. A new architecture was required.
They decided to migrate their existing on-prem infrastructure into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and adopt a new set of cloud native solutions. The team adopted Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as their new Kubernetes platform and evaluated Kubernetes ingresses.
“A good gateway is a gateway that is not seen. Traefik's API Gateway is both performant and stable.” - Sylvain Lebon, Lead Technical Architect, Customer and Commerce Digital Platform, Leroy Merlin
Sylvain Lebon is the Lead Technical Architect in the Customer and Commerce Digital Platform. Sylvain and his team presented the Cloud Containers team with the new Kubernetes ingress requirements. It needed to be capable of meeting at least 100,000 requests per second with a latency of no more than 20 milliseconds. Several solutions were considered, benchmarked, and individually tested across multiple criteria. Ultimately, Traefik's API Gateway was selected for four significant reasons.
Traefik's API Gateway is a high-performing Kubernetes Ingress.
Traefik's API Gateway successfully met the outlined requirements of meeting 100,000 requests per second with a latency of no more than 20 milliseconds.
“We knew it would be challenging to cap latency at 20 ms. Traefik's API Gateway made it possible.” - Xavier Baude, Technical Leader, Global Tech & Data Platform, Adeo Service
Traefik's API Gateway is a feature-rich Ingress and API gateway
Traefik's API Gateway offers several features that ease the networking complexity of microservice-based applications. A few key features that Adeo relies on include:
- Distributed and Multi-Cluster Let’s Encrypt: Traefik's API Gateway auto-renews Let’s Encrypt certificates across multiple clusters in a matter of minutes, simplifying certificate management. In contrast, with other solutions, the team would expend time building and maintaining certificates with CertManager.
- Public and Private Endpoints: With Traefik's API Gateway, the team can use the same proxy for public and private endpoints. This greatly simplifies deployment configurations. In contrast, other solutions require setting up a minimum of two separate instances.
- Secure Log Management: Traefik's API Gateway has features for hiding sensitive information and enhancing an application’s overall security. The team can limit field and header information stored in access logs, removing sensitive data like credentials and PII from Traefik logs. They can export Traefik logs to Datadog, their central observability platform, via a native Traefik connector.
- Ingress Routing: Controllers query the network infrastructure and automatically generate the appropriate routing configuration, and distribute them to proxy nodes without service interruption.
“Traefik's API Gateway has top-notch features.” - Sylvain Lebon, Lead Technical Architect, Customer and Commerce Digital Platform, Leroy Merlin
Traefik's API Gateway is highly scalable and easy to configure
Microservice-based applications are incredibly complex, which is why simplicity matters at scale. The ease of use and configuration of Traefik's API Gateway is critical for the scale of Leroy Merlin’s infrastructure.
“Traefik's API Gateway is easy to configure and scale. We have more than 50 clusters, and it is now effortless to manage." - Franck De Graeve, Lead Technical Architect, Global Tech & Data Platform, Adeo Services
Traefik's API Gateway includes responsive support
It is difficult to build a performant Kubernetes platform, and Maxime’s team highlighted the responsiveness and expertise of Traefik Labs as pivotal in helping them launch the new architecture.
“We appreciate the highly knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive support from Traefik Labs.” - Maxime Tricqueneaux, Cloud Product Manager, Adeo Services
Solution
Today, the Adeo team successfully deploys Traefik on their GKE platform at scale. Traefik's API Gateway handles all frontend traffic requests, representing 25,000 orders per day for the French website. Sustaining 200,000 requests per minute, Traefik's API Gateway exceeds the initial performance requirements and still leaves headroom for the architecture to scale.
Both Maxime and Sylvain’s team trust the performance of Traefik's API Gateway and finally have a solid grasp of their deployments. When an error happens, they can focus on their application without worrying about the ingress, to identify problems and find solutions more quickly.
“Traefik's API Gateway is a key component of our Kubernetes platform. We never worry about our ingress anymore.” - Xavier Baude, Technical Leader, Global Tech & Data Platform, Adeo Services
The new architecture (visualized below) meets the requirement of 99.99% availability. As a vital component of this architecture, Traefik's API Gateway contributes to its availability as it is a highly available and resilient solution.
Bottom line
Traefik's API Gateway is a performant, stable, and scalable solution that gives Adeo better control over its Kubernetes platform. A key component of Adeo's cloud infrastructure, Traefik's API Gateway has allowed Leroy Merlin to be recognized for having one of the highest-performing websites in France. Leroy Merlin is today scaling this model to other countries, such as Italy and South Africa. Both Maxime and Sylvain recommend Traefik for anyone looking to build a modern, cloud native platform.
“With Traefik's API Gateway, we can scale as needed without watching our performance suffer.” - Franck De Graeve, Lead Technical Architect, Global Tech & Data Platform, Adeo Services
