Case Study: Bonsai scales event-driven product data pipelines with Aiven

Bonsai Turns to Aiven for Automated Event-Driven Architecture to Handle Millions of Data Points

Bonsai is an e-commerce discovery commerce platform founded in 2016, serving publishers and retailers across North America and Europe. As its catalog grew from a few thousand products to millions with constant price and inventory updates, Bonsai’s heavily synchronous monolithic pipeline became hard to scale, especially around image uploads and product feed management. To address these challenges, Bonsai turned to Aiven for Apache Kafka® on Google Cloud.

Using Aiven, Bonsai shifted toward an event-driven architecture, making product ingestion more asynchronous and using a Kafka-to-MongoDB connector to automatically detect product changes and generate feeds. Aiven’s managed services, Google Cloud integration, price transparency, and Terraform support made implementation easier, while Bonsai was able to remove major pipeline bottlenecks and scale its data processing to millions of updates daily.

Bonsai

Brent Van Geertruy

Director of Engineering