A live video auction and shopping platform for collectors came to Armakuni for live video auction platform modernization: microservices migration, multi-gateway payments, customer data integration, automated deployment.
The challenge
A platform modernization engagement that grew into ongoing platform engineering ownership. Armakuni decomposed the monolith, rebuilt the bidder engagement layer, and now operates the modernized architecture that runs Gavel's live auction events end to end.
Scale: Live auction events streamed concurrently to bidders across multiple regions, with real-time bidding, chat, and video at peak event load. Hundreds of releases shipped weekly post-modernization.
What we built
Armakuni delivered live video auction platform modernization: microservices migration, multi-gateway payments, customer data integration, automated deployment. The engagement ran as multiple fixed-scope SOWs covering payment and auth modernization, monolith decomposition to microservices, customer data platform integration, automated deployment pipeline, and security hardening.
The outcomes
5 measurable outcomes shipped across the engagement. The ones that moved the business the most:
95% reduction in downtime across live auction events. Gavel stays available through the moments that drive revenue rather than failing exactly when bidders are most engaged.
60% increase in revenue. Multi-gateway checkout, persistent sessions, and real-time event notifications converted the bidders who used to abandon and unlocked the markets that PayPal-only had locked out.
25% increase in engagement rate. Push notifications drop bidders into events as they go live, social login removes signup friction, and personalization is built on actual customer data rather than guesswork.
15% infrastructure cost savings. Containerized microservices on Fargate, auto-scaling sized to real demand, and managed services replacing self-operated infrastructure drive the reduction.
100+ deployments shipped every week. Automated pipelines replace the manual coordination that used to cap release frequency and bottleneck the product roadmap behind ops capacity.
Built on AWS
The production environment runs on 14 first-party AWS services. Delivered under our AWS Migration and Modernization, DevOps, SaaS Consulting competencies.
What's next
Building agentic AI capabilities into the platform for personalized live event recommendations, real-time fraud detection during high-value auctions, and AI-driven catalog enrichment for sellers.
