Case Study: Jet.com achieves rapid, scalable e-commerce launch with Microsoft Azure

E-commerce challenger eyes the top spot, runs on the Microsoft cloud

Jet.com, founded by Marc Lore, is a membership-based e-commerce marketplace designed to undercut incumbents like Amazon by using an intelligent pricing engine that minimizes fulfillment and marketplace costs. Facing an aggressive goal to become a leading U.S. e-retailer within 18–36 months, the company lacked the resources to build and manage the datacenter and development infrastructure needed to scale, so it chose a cloud-first strategy.

Jet built its platform on Microsoft Azure using a microservices architecture with .NET/Visual F#, Visual Studio, Node, and open-source components (Elasticsearch, Redis, Hadoop, Event Store). Leveraging Azure App Service, VMs, API Management, Key Vault, Application Insights and CI/CD via Jenkins, Jet went from zero to a full marketplace in about 12 months, achieves code-to-production in minutes, runs entirely in the cloud with automatic scaling and expandable storage, and is positioned to handle millions of customers while avoiding on-site servers and significant upfront capex.

Jet.com

Mike Hanrahan

CTO