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Ready for the peak season: The infrastructure modernization powering faster product discovery
Retail's most important shopping moments are increasingly digital, and during peak periods, every part of the shopping journey matters.
Search and product discovery sit at the center of that experience, and when shoppers arrive with strong purchase intent, retailers need the technology and infrastructure that power discovery to respond quickly and consistently.
Netcore Unbxd has successfully completed its largest infrastructure migration ahead of the holiday season.
Cloud migration to infrastructure re-architecting for retailer’s impact
The goal wasn't simply to move Netcore Unbxd from one cloud environment to another, but it was to strengthen the technology foundation behind the product discovery experiences retailers depend on every day.
Here's what that means for retailers:
A next-generation cloud foundation
Netcore Unbxd has transitioned its platform infrastructure, creating a modern foundation for the services powering search, browse, recommendations, and other product discovery experiences.
For retailers: A current infrastructure foundation supports continued platform evolution without requiring retailers to rethink how they integrate with Netcore Unbxd.
Modern compute infrastructure
As part of this process, Netcore Unbxd moved to newly provisioned clusters.
For retailers: This refreshes the underlying compute environment that supports their product discovery workloads and provides Netcore Unbxd with a cleaner foundation for ongoing infrastructure and platform improvements.
A more current search technology foundation
As part of our infrastructure upgrade, sites were consolidated onto a modernized enterprise search platform, upgrading from Solr 6 to Solr 9.
For retailers: Their product discovery experience can run on a more current search technology foundation, while Netcore Unbxd has a more consistent platform on which to develop and optimize search capabilities.
Modernization completed before peak season
The migration program was successfully completed ahead of the holiday retail period.
For retailers: A more modern infrastructure foundation, combined with faster measured search response times, helps create a more responsive product discovery experience as shoppers arrive with heightened purchase intent during peak season.
Built for the moments that matter most
Peak season brings more shoppers, more product discovery interactions, and greater importance to every digital touchpoint. Netcore Unbxd's infrastructure migration was completed ahead of the holiday retail period, and early customer-level measurements show meaningful improvements in search responsiveness.
Across several customer environments, Netcore Unbxd observed 10-30% improvements in P95 search response times following the platform upgrade. These measured improvements demonstrate how infrastructure upgrade can translate into a more responsive search experience, strengthening the technology foundation behind product discovery ahead of the peak holiday season.
For retailers, that means the technology foundation behind product discovery is not just more scalable; it is already demonstrating measurable performance improvements in the environments where shoppers search for products.
That makes infrastructure optimization more than an engineering milestone but an investment in a faster, more responsive product discovery experience at a time when every shopper interaction matters.
What changed for customers?
One of the most important goals while creating a resilient foundation was to minimize disruption on the customer side.
For API integrations, no customer changes were required.
API endpoints remained unchanged because routing was handled on the Netcore Unbxd side, and there were no SDK changes.
Customers received communications before and after their migration windows. That means customers could continue using Netcore Unbxd without having to redesign their existing integrations simply because the underlying infrastructure had changed.
The performance impact is measurable
Following the infrastructure transformation, Netcore Unbxd saw 10-30% improvements in p95 search response times across measured customer environments.
P95 measures the response time within which 95% of requests are completed, making it a useful indicator of search responsiveness beyond the average experience. These findings demonstrate why infrastructure should be evaluated by its measurable impact on product discovery, not simply by the tech stack beneath it.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. One of the core goals of this modernization was to deliver performance improvements without causing operational friction or requiring engineering rework for retailers. Routing was managed internally by Netcore Unbxd, so API endpoints, SDKs, and existing customer integrations remain completely unchanged.
Following the platform upgrade, Netcore Unbxd observed 10% to 30% improvements in P95 search response times across several measured customer environments. P95 latency measures the time within which 95% of search requests are completed, serving as a reliable metric for search responsiveness under real-world shopping conditions.
The platform underwent a comprehensive architectural refresh built in partnership with Google Cloud. Key updates include:
- Transitioning to a next-generation cloud foundation with newly provisioned compute clusters.
- Modernizing the enterprise search engine from Solr 6 to Solr 9.
- Optimizing underlying workflows for search, browse, recommendations, feeds, indexing, and analytics services.
Peak shopping periods bring higher traffic, increased search volumes, and shoppers with strong intent to buy. Modernizing the infrastructure prior to the holiday season ensures the search platform can handle heavy demand without performance degradation, delivering a fast, reliable, and frictionless product discovery experience when it matters most to retailers' bottom lines.
