Service Abstractions to Cloud Service Providers: A Tale of Trade-Offs

Mercado Libre, the largest e-commerce, fintech & logistics company in LATAM with over 110 million active users, more than 26K microservices, and 50K data services, heavily relies on core platform services such as databases, pub-sub messaging, data streams, big data, and search engines. For most of these, we built abstractions to cloud services providers that play an essential role regarding our priorities, like uptime, compliance, and efficiency. This extra layer shortens the learning curve and allows the development teams to focus on running their business rather than delving into the peculiarities of a cloud vendor and its idiosyncratic interfaces, improving their productivity and reducing the overall time-to-market. However, there are always trade-offs, and, for some scenarios, we chose to use the providers' services directly.Our abstractions deliver excellent flexibility in supporting maintenance and evolution since it maximizes the reuse potential of these interfaces and keeps the implementation details isolated in one place. So, for example, although we had thousands of microservices relying on our key-value store abstraction, we could evolve it to take full advantage of new technologies without requiring changes to any of those services. In addition, they also leverage the adoption of strategies like Multi-Availability Zones, Multi-Region, Multi-Account, and Multi-Cloud, increasing the resiliency to outage events and helping the organization comply with the broad range of regulatory and governance mandates. For example, during an incident with one of our cloud providers, we could transparently move our message broker abstraction, which is responsible for delivering billions of messages per minute to thousands of microservices, to another provider and thus mitigate the impact that had on our business. Cloud service provider abstractions brought significant competitive advantages to Mercado Libre regarding governance, resiliency, flexibility and efficiency. Considering the current potential economic volatility, when companies are bracing for a harsh reality ahead and freezing or reducing staffing for low-priority projects, efficiency has become an even more critical concern.n this session, we will present the different strategies we utilized to build our cloud providers' abstractions, discuss the trade-offs associated with each of them, and tell some of the unique challenges we faced and the lessons we learned along the way. In this session, we will present the different strategies we utilized to build our cloud providers' abstractions, discuss the trade-offs associated with each of them, and tell some of the unique challenges we faced and the lessons we learned along the way.