CASE STUDY
Rakuten Advertising
How Multi-Cloud Architecture Enabled 132% Revenue Growth
Affiliate marketing platform transformed from on-premise infrastructure to multi-cloud platform, enabling rapid market expansion and new product launches.
Business Context
The Challenge
Rakuten Advertising operated a major affiliate marketing platform serving publishers and advertisers globally. After acquiring Slice Intelligence, they wanted to expand their affiliate platform capabilities but were constrained by aging on-premise infrastructure.
The business challenge was clear: expand into new geographic markets and launch 2 new affiliate portals without the 18-month infrastructure timeline they'd experienced with previous expansions.
On-premise infrastructure required physical data center presence for geographic expansion, creating a fundamental constraint on go-to-market velocity.
Technical Challenge
On-Premise Bottleneck
- Legacy monolith in data centers
- 18-month lead time for new markets
- Hardware failures causing outages
- No infrastructure standardization
Business Impact
- Lost competitive deals
- Product launches delayed
- Customer SLAs at risk
- Operations scaled linearly
Market Constraints
- Geographic expansion blocked
- Multi-cloud requirements unmet
- Enterprise deals lost
- Platform evolution stalled
Strategic Approach
The Insight
Infrastructure location is a go-to-market decision, not just a technology choice.
To expand internationally and launch new products quickly, we needed infrastructure that could be deployed in new regions in days, not months. Multi-cloud wasn't about avoiding vendor lock-in - it was about matching infrastructure to customer requirements.
Key Decisions:
- • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as primary platform
- • Multi-cluster architecture with service mesh
- • Infrastructure-as-Code for repeatable deployments
- • Regional isolation with failover capabilities
Implementation
Phase 1: Foundation
- • Designed 7-cluster GKE architecture
- • Implemented Istio service mesh
- • Built Terraform modules
- • Created migration runbooks
Phase 2: Migration
- • Migrated core platform from on-prem
- • Moved workloads from EKS to GKE
- • Zero downtime maintained
- • Multi-region traffic routing
Phase 3: Expansion
- • Launched 2 new affiliate portals
- • Deployed to 3 new regions
- • Automated deployment pipelines
- • Self-service portal for teams
Business Impact
Immediate Results
- • 2-hour release cycles (from weeks)
- • Zero ops involvement in deployments
- • Geographic expansion: 18 months → 3 weeks
- • Infrastructure standardized across products
Business Outcomes
- • 2 new affiliate portals launched in 6 months
- • Entered 3 new international markets
- • 132% revenue growth year-over-year
- • 30% ops team reduction while scaling 3x
Strategic Value
- • Multi-cloud capability as differentiator
- • Product teams could launch in weeks
- • Sales could commit to customer requirements
- • Platform became business enabler