Mercadolibre builds 1,000-node Ubuntu cloud for IT on demand

Ubuntu and AWS cloud used to capture, protect and monetise data across platforms

Summary

Mercadolibre has risen to prominence as Latin America’s leading e-commerce and auction site. Founded in 1999 with a handful of employees, it is now the eighth-largest online retailer, handling up to two million site requests per minute and four million in peak times. To support its business, Mercadolibre has built a distributed cloud infrastructure based on Ubuntu and OpenStack. While it previously took days or weeks to provision new compute and storage resources, developers and managers can now auto-provision the infrastructure they need in real time. Ensuring that IT is constantly aligned to the needs of the business, the Openstack / Ubuntu Cloud also provides virtually unlimited scalability with no increase in licensing costs. To ensure mission-critical systems are constantly available, Mercadolibre’s cloud is supported by Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project.