Case Study: Drouot Digital achieves scalable, global online-auction performance and cost savings with Google Cloud Platform

Drouot Digital Successfully moving towards selling art objects online

Drouot Digital runs the online auction platforms for the Drouot Group, connecting 120,000 bidders with 240 auction houses and publishing over 3,500 catalogues and more than one million lots annually. Faced with three separate, monolithic IT systems that were costly to operate and hard to scale—especially for global live video auctions and peak events like Téléthon—Drouot needed better performance, availability, automation, and a faster way to deploy and manage infrastructure.

Drouot migrated to Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, CDN and App Engine) and implemented DevOps tooling (Terraform, Ansible, GitLab), automated backups and managed services. The four-month migration delivered faster, more stable global streaming and image delivery, automated provisioning that reduced event prep from a month to minutes, tripled virtual machines while cutting server costs by 20%, cached 5 TB (≈70%) of images to halve load on servers, and supported annual sales of €87 million with improved resilience and scalability.

Drouot Digital

Olivier Cauvin

CTO