Case Study: Gilt achieves real-time, highly scalable flash-sale performance with Akka

The Typesafe Platform at Gilt Groupe

Gilt Groupe, a members-only flash-sale e-commerce site, needed to build next-generation services and a real-time shopping experience while addressing scaling limits from its earlier Ruby on Rails/Java mix and handling extreme, predictable traffic spikes (notably a heavy noon peak). Implementing Gilt Live also required specialized real-time capabilities such as WebSockets and seamless integration with existing Java systems.

Gilt adopted the Typesafe Platform—Scala, Play Framework and Akka—to build Gilt Live. Play provided fast development and WebSocket support, while Akka’s actors and futures handled concurrent back-end requests and peak load with minimal tuning. The result was a rapid, low‑code prototype that scaled to handle heavy traffic, reduced time-to-market, and made Play the company’s preferred view framework.

Gilt

Jonathan Goldberg

Lead Software Engineer