Andrew Tate leads cloud transformation at the UK’s leading property website

In housing-obsessed Britain, Rightmove occupies such a special place in the national consciousness that its web metrics track breaking news events.

“When something big happens in the UK, we can tell because traffic volumes drop and then rise again when they stop,” says Andrew Tate, Head of Technology Operations. The stack.”It is a very real national barometer.”

Rightmove is the leading property website in the UK, with 140 million visits per month. SimilarWeb estimates the site to be ranked 12th in the UK as a whole and 206th globally. It is ranked fourth in the global property rankings. With 50 million page views and 10,000 properties uploaded per day, users spend 1.3 billion minutes on the site each month.

Internally, Rightmove employs over 200 engineers across over 20 product teams and has a huge and rapidly growing data set that takes up around a petabyte of storage. Simply put, it’s a huge asset that needs to be carefully managed.

The stack spoke to Tate about his role in leading the cloud transformation of this famous website, which had revenues of £364.3 million last year – a 10% increase on the previous year. Last year, the company increased its technology spend by £2 million, with the increase mainly funding “higher spend on AI consulting, migration of our data centers to the cloud, infrastructure maintenance and higher software licensing costs as a result of increased headcount,” according to its annual results report.

We started by asking Tate about his somewhat unusual job title.

“I think it’s maybe a little old-fashioned,” he says lightly. “It hasn’t necessarily evolved as much as the role has.”

As the job title suggests, Tate oversees technical operations, which includes managing infrastructure and data stores, being responsible for site reliability, and leading platform development. Tate’s teams provide the platform, tools, and services that development and product teams use to deliver functionality to end users.

“It’s one of the top 10 websites in the UK and has been around for around 20 years,” he says. “We have a lot of data. We get a huge amount of website traffic. And we’re constantly delivering product features to customers like estate agents, mortgage lenders, valuers and many other property and financial institutions, as well as the consumer side of the website.”

Heading in the right directionTowards the cloud

Tate has been responsible for the cloud “from the beginning” after joining four years ago. “It became clear that if we really wanted to modernize and simplify our platform, the cloud was the obvious option,” he recalls.

In the past, Rightmove operated from three active data centres, with traffic distributed across all facilities. This was “really reliable” but also introduced “high levels of complexity and effort”, particularly in the database architecture. For example, data often fell out of sync as writes occurred in different locations, requiring the building of bespoke services.

Rightmove had an AWS account but no cloud in its production environment. To change this, Tate first spent a year “understanding the realities of the country: the people, the culture and the level of technology.”

This began in 2021 with the selection of Google Cloud Platform and the creation of a secure landing zone for containerized workloads. By the end of 2022, Rightmove expanded the platform to handle large traffic, migrated key services to the cloud, and introduced machine learning for content moderation. In 2023, the company began building 100 microservices and a new data architecture for improved insights and product development.

In the past, developers wrote code and passed it on to the operations team, who deployed it and managed its reliability. Today, a context-bound microservice pattern is being adopted, allowing development teams to “take more ownership and better control the end-to-end flow of value from the code in their head to the functionality on the website.” This means that teams now largely run the things they build, with an enterprise-wide focus on building reusable modules that enable self-service.

Rightmove was tied to a two-week release schedule, which has now been replaced by a high velocity continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) model for the applications and development team, eliminating the need to wait up to 14 days to make changes to the databases.

Crucially, the entire website now runs in the cloud. “It used to take months to upgrade our on-premises application hosting environment,” Tate adds. “There were many different environments and data centers. With Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we can now do it in 40 minutes without anyone having to do much. That’s a huge reduction in overhead and complexity.”

Much of the cloud deployment was then done in-house – with limited outsourcing – to improve the skills of the workforce. Tate says this decision to focus on augmenting existing resources led to “changing careers” in teams like the database administration (DBA), who was once “a little bit isolated from some team members” but was among the first people to “get to grips with the GCP API and TerraForm.”

“One of the people on the DBA team is now a really strong cloud engineer with a database specialization. Now the team writes the TerraForm code to integrate Cockroach dB, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering, and provisioning Cloud SQL instances. They are no longer just managing databases and now have more time to focus on higher-value tasks.”

Challenges in real estate data

One of Tate’s biggest challenges is managing the huge amounts of data that flow through Rightmove’s systems. “We’ve never deleted a property image in the 24-odd years the company has been around,” he says.

He is leading the implementation of dynamic search filters to sort through the vast amounts of unstructured data in real estate images and make them accessible to AI models. “There’s a huge amount of data there to train models with,” Tates adds. “We want to use that unstructured data to help people find properties based on what’s in the image.”

The result is that images are first scanned by AI and then categorized so that features can be displayed based on users’ preferences or search terms.

To support data management, Rightmove deployed CockroachDB, a distributed database using standard SQL for cloud applications, as its system of record, reducing architectural complexity and enabling multi-cloud, multi-region resiliency.

“When we migrated to the cloud, we really wanted a new database vendor to provide us with a simplified replication model that would give us the geographic resiliency we needed, but wouldn’t create complexity for our development team,” says Tate. “Having a single endpoint to write to simplifies the effort enormously, so developers don’t have to worry about what URLs they’re using or how the load balancing looks.”

What can corporate technical leaders learn from Rightmove?

We asked Tate to share his experiences driving change in a large organization.

“There are two important aspects to consider,” he says. “First, the human and cultural side, which is often overlooked. It is crucial to make decisions early on about how you want to involve your teams in the transformation. If you want them to be part of it and manage the new system afterwards, you need to invest in them from the start. If you get that right, it becomes a force multiplier. If you get it wrong, it can slow everything down.

“The second aspect is data. It’s important to understand your key business units and how well your data fits with them before trying to unravel everything. Especially in a software company with many interdependencies, a good understanding of data requirements – both analytical and operational – will facilitate the transformation process. Making sure you understand your data and its consumers will help you avoid obstacles like intertwined data stores used by different teams for different purposes.”