Instacart Scales with Confluent to Meet Demand

In the whirlwind of 2020, Instacart faced unprecedented demand as the pandemic reshaped how people accessed groceries. Overnight, the company onboarded half a million new customers, requiring an immediate and scalable solution to maintain real-time inventory availability and seamless service across its expanding network of 59,000 locations.

To meet this challenge, Instacart turned to Confluent Cloud, leveraging its data streaming capabilities to build new systems and keep pace with explosive growth. This strategic decision enabled Instacart to effectively manage what equated to ten years of growth in just six weeks. By adopting Confluent, Instacart established a scalable data streaming platform, providing customers with accurate inventory visibility and ensuring they could get what they needed when they needed it.

The collaboration with Confluent allowed Instacart to focus on innovation and core product development rather than being bogged down by the complexities of managing open-source Kafka. This partnership not only supported the company's rapid expansion but also laid the foundation for future growth and enhanced customer experiences. Instacart's success story highlights the transformative power of data streaming in navigating periods of extreme growth and underscores the importance of a reliable and scalable data infrastructure.

Value Results:

• Achieved extreme scalability to efficiently serve hundreds of thousands of new customers during peak demand.

• Enhanced fraud detection and improved inventory availability, opening doors for new use cases.

• Established a robust data backbone, fostering better collaboration across teams.

• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to managing open-source Kafka, freeing up valuable resources.