Case Study: Ritchie Bros achieves greater reliability and seamless customer experiences with Gremlin

How Ritchie Bros Creates a Culture of Reliability

Ritchie Bros, the world's largest auctioneer of commercial assets and vehicles, faced the challenge of modernizing its complex, disparate technology systems without causing disruptive outages. They needed to consolidate databases, improve performance, and most importantly, ensure a seamless and reliable experience for their customers, who often bid from areas with low internet connectivity. To tackle this technological inertia, SVP of Engineering Ranbir Chawla turned to chaos engineering through the vendor Gremlin.

By implementing Gremlin, Ritchie Bros built a culture of proactively identifying and resolving system weaknesses before they impacted customers. Teams used Gremlin's fault injection experiments to test new code and infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, in pre-production, which uncovered and allowed them to fix critical issues prior to launch. This solution gave engineers confidence in their deployments, prevented incidents during high-value auctions, and drastically reduced after-hours pages. The result is a more resilient platform that supports innovation and has helped over half of the 300-person engineering team achieve a better work-life balance.

Ritchie Bros

Ranbir Chawla

Senior Vice President of Engineering