Online home store Wayfair LLC delivered 61 million orders in 2020. That’s a lot of sales … and making the online sales process easier, as well as streamlining the handling of customer data, is essential to the company’s continued success.

Gary White (pictured), staff engineer at Wayfair, works with tech partners to ensure the company remains one of the biggest sellers of home goods on the internet, because there is more to it than just selling furniture.

“Carrying one of the widest spaces of items means that we have to have incredible resiliency in our data and access to that data,” White said. “And then we try to build world-class development tools to compete with a talent market that is some of the biggest firms in the world.”

White spoke with David Nicholson, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. They discussed the need for the ability to control and process the vast amounts of data that Wayfair deals with every day from a technology standpoint. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud native tech enhances business flow

White is just one of many at Wayfair who work behind the scenes to develop the infrastructure that brings all of its home furnishing items to the customer, quickly and easily. For many companies, investment in what makes everything work behind the scenes is an important part of doing business, and for Wayfair this meant investing in cloud native technologies to make automation easier, especially when dealing with multiple items at once or when integrating microservices and other applications.

To help with its business flow, Wayfair has invested heavily in open-source projects. One of these is the Tremor Project, an early-stage event processing system designed to allow the digestion of lots of data and then filter it to other systems downstream.

“You may want to throttle the amount of data that you have coming in. And that was a big topic that I also mentioned at the CloudNativeCon and at TremorCon, where you can deal with this really massive volume that we have to do at the scale that we exist as a business and just filter it so that it doesn’t overwhelm everything downstream,” White stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. (* Disclosure: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE