Snapdeal launches private cloud platform Cirrus

Aiming to further smoothen and enrich the customer experience, online marketplace Snapdeal has announced the launch of its private cloud platform, Cirrus. This move also emphasizes companies’ increasing dependence of big data for better service.

Rajiv Mangla, the  Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Snapdeal, said in a statement, “Snapdeal Cirrus is one of the few successful examples globally of a large hybrid cloud built at a scale of public cloud, purely using open source technologies like OpenStack and Ceph.”

This platform would essentially offer a more frictionless, reliable experience to customers and help save costs. It is built on open source with OpenStack at the centre.

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, said, “At more than 100,000 cores and 16 petabytes of storage, Snapdeal Cirrus is one of the largest OpenStack deployments globally. Retail is one of the fastest growing vertical markets for OpenStack, and Snapdeal is one such e-commerce player outside of North America who are embracing the open source.”

Hybrid cloud Snapdeal Cirrus spans across three data centre regions, with highly dense server architecture of 100,000 cores, 16 PB of storage, and a robust 100G SDN infrastructure — an investment made by very few companies globally.

Mangla added, “Snapdeal was born in the cloud, but public clouds stop being cost efficient after a scale, which became the case for Snapdeal sometime last year. In a short span of 10 months, we have succeeded in building an extremely resilient, scalable and secure solution.

The company recently also announced the launch of its premium services called Snapdeal Gold to take on its biggest rivals like Amazon and Flipkart. If a user subscribes to the Gold, the company will provide services like free shipping, free upgrade to next-day-delivery and extended purchase protection.