Back Market migrates from Snowflake and Databricks to BigQuery

At Back Market, we’re fighting climate change one electronic device at a time.

Our digital marketplace connects more than 1,800 sellers of professionally refurbished electronic devices — from smartphones and computers to home appliances and gaming consoles — with buyers looking for a good deal. We’re proud to be able to say that since 2014, we’ve averted the emission of 2 million tons of CO2 by helping more than 17 million customers purchase refurbished electronics that work just as well as new ones.

But our carbon-conscious business model poses an interesting IT challenge: Behind every website is a carbon-emitting IT infrastructure of CO2-producing data centers. To combat this, our IT team began to rethink its vendor-agnostic IT strategy. Being able to cherry-pick technologies from any provider was appealing initially, but this wasn’t scalable as the company grew.

Our tech stack was built on Amazon ...