Rakuten builds automated e-commerce infrastructure with Proxmox VE

To improve performance, cost predictability, and operational flexibility, Rakuten France modernized its QA (Quality Assurance) and development infrastructure with Proxmox VE. What began as a replacement for a cloud-based setup became an important proof point for extending the platform to a 17-node production cluster with around 500 virtual machines.

As one of the country's major digital marketplaces, Rakuten France supports a broad range of services through its IT infrastructure—spanning from development and quality assurance to databases, microservices, DNS services, Kubernetes-based applications, and high-traffic production workloads. For an online marketplace, responsive and reliable infrastructure is essential to keep development cycles moving and digital services available.

The cloud bottleneck: High costs and performance lags

Before the new platform was built, the company’s QA and development environments ran on a public cloud hosted by another provider. Although the model offered flexibility in theory, the day-to-day experience no longer met operational expectations.

Performance was consistently slow, affecting QA and development workflows and making testing less efficient. Technical support was another pain point, as response times and issue resolution did not meet the team’s needs. Costs also became increasingly difficult to justify: compared with equivalent self-hosted capacity, the previous cloud-based setup was estimated to be roughly three times more expensive.

The goal was clear: build a platform with better performance, more predictable costs, responsive support, and enough flexibility to create and remove QA environments on demand.

Building an automated platform with Proxmox VE

Enix, the hosting and managed-services partner for the new QA and development platform, recommended Proxmox VE as the virtualization foundation. With its Proxmox VE expertise and 24/7 managed-services model, Enix helped Rakuten France design, implement, and operate the new environment.

Proxmox VE gave the team the flexibility to automate QA environments through infrastructure-as-code. Using Terraform, environments can be created and removed as needed. The open architecture also helped avoid restrictive licensing models, making it possible to operate hypervisors with high core counts without the per-core licensing costs associated with some traditional virtualization platforms.

Performance was another key factor. Several workloads are older monolithic Java applications that depend heavily on strong single-thread performance. The platform was therefore designed around the actual application profile rather than generic hardware benchmarks.

From QA platform to production cluster

The implementation began with a four-node QA platform and was later expanded into a seven-node QA and development cluster. Enix supported the hardware definition, installation, network engineering, and infrastructure-as-code tooling. The final design shared redundancy across the cluster and maintained enough spare capacity to tolerate the loss of one full hypervisor.

The QA and development cluster was designed as a Proxmox-native platform from the start. Each Dell server is equipped with two AMD EPYC 7443 processors, 1 TB of RAM, and two 15 TB NVMe drives for Ceph. The Terraform-based automation was designed to work together with automated VM rebalancing through ProxLB, an open-source load balancer for Proxmox VE, so that workload movements within the cluster remain aligned with the infrastructure-as-code state.

Today, Rakuten France operates two Proxmox VE clusters:

• QA and development: A seven-node Proxmox VE cluster with Ceph storage, designed for infrastructure-as-code and on-demand provisioning.
• Production: A 17-node Proxmox VE cluster with approximately 500 VMs.
• Scale: Around 900 virtual machines across both clusters, including approximately 500 in production and 400 in QA and pre-production.
• Storage: Ceph in the QA and development cluster; inherited iSCSI SAN storage in the production cluster.
• Availability model: High availability is handled primarily at the application layer, while the Proxmox VE layer is designed as stateless compute.

Other production components exist outside this specific environment and are not part of the scope of this story. The Proxmox VE platform described here supports the e-commerce site and key services such as MariaDB, Couchbase, Redis, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL with Patroni, Kubernetes, Docker-based microservices, and PowerDNS.

Persistent application and database data are handled on separate physical systems with their own backup and recovery mechanisms. For this reason, Proxmox Backup Server is not part of this specific architecture.

Lower costs and more performance

The move from the previous cloud-based QA and development environment to Proxmox VE delivered clear operational and business benefits. The most visible result was cost reduction. Compared with the previous locally managed cloud provider, the new Proxmox VE-based platform reduced QA and development infrastructure costs by approximately a factor of three. At the same time, the team gained a more predictable cost model and avoided the licensing limitations associated with traditional virtualization platforms.

Performance also improved. The new infrastructure provides faster and more predictable behavior for QA and development workloads, helping teams work more efficiently. With Terraform-based automation, environments can be created and removed on demand, supporting a more fluid development process while keeping operations consistent and manageable.

Most importantly, the QA and development environment became a successful proof point. Its reliability, performance, and operational flexibility gave the team the confidence to extend Proxmox VE to a 17-node production cluster.

A scalable foundation for future growth

What started as a QA and development platform has grown into a broader virtualization environment supporting both non-production and production workloads. With infrastructure-as-code, Ceph-based storage for QA and development, and application-level redundancy, Proxmox VE gives Rakuten France a flexible platform for operating and expanding its e-commerce infrastructure.

Thibaud Simond
Head of Infrastructure at Rakuten France

About Rakuten France
Rakuten France is an e-commerce company headquartered in Paris. Founded in 2000, the company operates a major online shopping platform and employs approximately 200 people. As part of the global Rakuten Group, Rakuten France provides digital marketplace services for online shoppers and merchants, supported by an IT environment that spans development, quality assurance, databases, microservices, and production workloads.

About Enix
Enix is a hosting and managed-services provider specializing in open-source infrastructure and Proxmox VE. The company supported Rakuten France in designing, implementing, and operating the QA and development platform.