Case Study: BigCommerce achieves real-time data streaming, scalability, and 20‑hour/week Kafka ops savings with Confluent

How BigCommerce Upleveled Kafka Management for Digital Retail Innovation

BigCommerce, the cloud e-commerce platform powering tens of thousands of merchants, was struggling to scale and operate self‑managed Apache Kafka: the team spent over 20 hours a week and multiple engineers’ time on cluster maintenance, overprovisioned resources for peak traffic, and relied on batch analytics with long delays. To get real‑time data without that operational overhead, BigCommerce turned to Confluent and its fully managed Confluent Cloud Kafka platform.

Confluent executed a phased migration, moving 1.6 billion events per day (22 broker nodes, 3 clusters, 15 TB) in five months with zero downtime and zero data loss, while delivering elastic scalability and a 99.99% uptime SLA. The switch to Confluent saved about 20 hours/week in Kafka management, eliminated the 10–15% overprovisioning buffer, sped up merchant analytics via BigQuery and GCS connectors, and freed engineers to focus on product innovation.

BigCommerce

Mahendra Kumar

Vice President of Data and Software Engineering