A student in search of a sofa. A new parent buying a buggy. A busy professional in need of a plumber. Whatever people are looking for, Gumtree has been making good finds happen for the last 20 years. Our site is already used by one in five of the UK’s online population, and with the current economic climate and the drive for more sustainable consumption both boosting the circular economy, the need for Gumtree has never been greater.

Gumtree is now in a strong position to meet that need. Our business recently completed a complex 18-month secession from Adevinta ASA and eBay, leaving Gumtree to operate as an independent business. We are now free to manage our own affairs and looking forward to new growth as we pivot away from our previous advertising-based business model. This next stage marks a shift towards a user-centric approach, where we plan to develop features that bring real value to the people who use our services.

The limiting effect of legacy architecture

One of the most significant steps of this transition was migrating our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud. Having been owned by eBay from 2005 until the acquisition by Adevinta in 2020, our infrastructure was hosted on-premises and was centrally managed, along with our data, by eBay.

That presented two key challenges. On a business level, as a small part of a very large company, it was difficult for us to prioritize our objectives to suit our local needs, particularly in terms of being able to use our data to shape strategy. On a technology level, the company was relying on an old, legacy system, which meant that even when our objectives were prioritized, inefficient infrastructure and data systems made it difficult to move quickly.

Data queries took a long time to deliver imprecise insights, which made it harder for us to optimize our business and build new features. Far from being an enabler, technology was a hindrance, and because everything was managed centrally, there was little we could do about it.

Starting afresh in the cloud

Becoming an independent business gave us a clean slate to rebuild our systems to suit our requirements. At the same time, however, we had a very strict time frame of 18 months to transform our entire business. We knew that simply lifting and shifting our systems to another provider could have been the simpler option, but we also knew the importance of building a scalable, agile platform, responsive to our business needs.

After speaking with the Google Cloud team, we were confident they could support us through the challenging migration of our complex technology stack and provide us with the most cost-effective, high-performance platform for our needs.

The transition was probably the most challenging period in Gumtree’s history. Fortunately, our journey to the cloud was not. The Google Cloud team supported us throughout the entire migration with their technical knowledge of similar projects and strategic advice on building our infrastructure architecture.

As the deadline to switch off our old systems approached, the pressure ramped up on the entire team. We worked around the clock to move, configure, and test applications to ensure minimal interruption for our users. We then switched off the site for 20 hours as we moved everything over to Google Cloud before firing up our brand-new platform and embarking on another three-day stretch, testing everything for eventual bugs. It was a stressful period, but an empowering one for our business, uniting our team in a common mission. We have emerged in a much stronger position.

Taking control of our technology — and our future

After moving to Google Cloud, our site speed increased by 40%. This has had a big impact on our business, creating a better user experience and reducing our bounce rate, which helps with our viewability and advertising effort and ultimately drives more revenue. Google Cloud billing dashboards have also given us a clear insight into our cloud spend, helping us to optimize resources.

Perhaps the most important result of this migration, however, is that our infrastructure is now in our own hands, meaning we can adjust it quickly to suit our needs. For example, we recently rebuilt our search results page, one of the most valuable pages on our site, but quickly realized that the computational costs were too high to release it. With our legacy, centrally managed architecture, it would have been difficult to understand where the inefficiencies lay, but with Google Cloud, we were easily able to optimize the page to be more cost-effective than our previous search results page, as well as significantly faster.

Seeing our business in a new light, with clear data insights

When it came to migrating our data, on the other hand, our looming deadline meant we initially opted for a lift and shift, moving our existing structures into a third-party data warehouse. We soon found that we were still facing the same problems, with a lack of unified data preventing us from reaching the insights we needed to drive our business decisions. We are now in the process of migrating our data to BigQuery, to enable us to be more agile with our queries and gain faster, smarter insights. We are already seeing the benefits, with BigQuery giving us insights in minutes, as opposed to the hours it used to take. In this way, we hope to unlock new insights to transform strategic decision-making, such as a deeper understanding of how individual users interact with the various listing categories on our platform. Such insights can then help us drive cross-vertical usage of the platform by recommending relevant categories to each user.

Moving to Google Cloud has been pivotal in our journey towards becoming an independent, modern technology company. With our business under our own control, Gumtree is now free to set its own priorities and become the UK’s number-one local trading platform. And with our technology in our own hands, we can ensure that our systems are optimized to support us on that journey. Where previously we were forced to jettison certain ambitions due to inefficient architecture and centralized control, we are now able to use our technology in an agile manner to build new features and services to improve our offering. Technology is no longer a hindrance, but an enabler, providing the foundation we need to take us on the next stage of our journey.