The Challenge: Growing a Local Marketplace into a Microservices Ecosystem

OfferUp’s early infrastructure revolved around a monolith architecture running on Python and EC2 instances, with a fragile routing setup and limited automation. Scaling new capabilities—like bringing small businesses onto the platform, often required heavy, hands-on efforts, making each route update or infrastructure tweak a slog. As OfferUp expanded beyond personal, face-to-face sales, leadership realized the monolithic environment couldn’t keep up with the demands of running multiple vertical marketplaces. 

“Our teams were upgrading Kubernetes clusters, managing virtual machine (VM) images and the time it took added up,” says Mike. “We wanted to free our team to focus on innovating and improving our services, rather than constantly wrestling with low-level technical nuances.”

In addition to alleviating Cloud Engineering team’s manual resource-intensive workload, OfferUp also wanted to implement a Kubernetes-based approach that enabled developers to self-serve and manage their routes without always depending on their technical operations teams. The ability for teams to spin up or modify microservices quickly became an essential requirement for accelerating new features across rentals, jobs, and community services verticals.

The Solution: Embracing Cloud-Native Architecture

Migrating from a monolith to a cloud-native environment, OfferUp adopted Kubernetes and chose Gloo Gateway for routing and ingress requirements. This approach checked all their boxes:

- Granular Configuration & Control: Gloo Gateway’s namespace-based approach allows each development team to manage routing for their microservices without impacting other teams.

- Canary Rollouts: By gradually shifting small percentages of traffic to new versions of Gloo Gateway, OfferUp could confidently test new features with less risk and quickly revert if needed.

- Open-Source Foundation: Having access to the source code of Gloo Gateway helped accelerate any troubleshooting and provided flexibility for teams fine-tuning their implementation.

Switching to a robust, cloud-native gateway also meant zero-downtime upgrades for the OfferUp team. Instead of waiting for late-night deployments and then frantically scrambling when something went wrong, the team can now update routing during regular hours with the confidence of near-instant rollback capabilities if needed.

As Mike puts it, “In the last two years, I have never woken up to issues related to Gloo Gateway. It just works.”‍

Driving Business Value and Team Empowerment

With the heavy operational burden lightened, OfferUp’s Cloud Engineering team and developers could finally relieve resource constraints and dedicate more time to innovation. “Before we had 80 percent of our time dealing with operations, nowadays it’s only about 40 percent,” Mike explains. “That extra time can be spent on improvement and innovation—or even automating more tasks that come up regularly.”

At OfferUp, microservices flourished, with over 200 deployed, and by offloading routing responsibilities to Gloo Gateway, developers were free to experiment and design new features across verticals. This newfound agility became crucial for expanding the platform into jobs, rentals, and pro services in just six months—an outcome that would have taken years under the old environment and systems. OfferUp even began tracking DORA metrics to measure deployment frequency and mean-time-to-recovery, refining the process so each release is faster, safer, and less of a hassle.

“Developers rarely need to escalate routing issues now,” Mike says. “That’s exactly what success looks like.

Buying, Selling, and Beyond: What’s Next?

OfferUp is continuing to evolve from an app for local buying and selling into the go-to platform for discovering everything a local community has to offer—from opportunities to buy and sell, to great jobs, pro services, and community-based interaction. Experimentation never stops, and the OfferUp Cloud Engineering team continues to refine its infrastructure, using Gloo Gateway to enable seamless scaling and greater developer autonomy. 

“Without Gloo Gateway we’d still be spending most of our time on ops and routing requests. Now we can spend more time innovating,” said Mike.

As OfferUp innovates and expands into new verticals, they do so with a robust foundation built to scale alongside big ideas.

By embracing Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway, OfferUp is building a stronger foundation for local discovery, exchange, and connection in their marketplace. They’ve automated resource-intensive processes, empowered their developers, and created space for innovation to thrive, enabling them to pursue a bigger, bolder vision for the future of local commerce and community.