This year Avito is 10 years old. Perhaps one of you noticed our big advertising campaign under the slogan "People - People." Or maybe even saw the results of the anniversary contest of ads, when artists painted the most original ads online. This is all part of the holiday that could be seen outside. And what's inside? If you want to look behind the scenes and find out a few details about the life of the classifier leading in Russia - click on the cat!

Beginning of Avito History

Avito was founded by two entrepreneurs from Sweden. Jonas Nordlander came to Russia for the first time in 2006 after he sold his project to eBay corporation, the online auction Tradera.com. At that time, he had a successful project Bilannonser.se, which was also sold to eBay. In 2007 they became partners with Philip Engelbert - then he invested in the Swedish holding Kontakt East Holding (KEH), which bought the famous offline directory Yellow Pages. Together they came up with Avito.

Today, the question of how the name of the company appeared, the founders answer - an accident.
“Good domains were then bought up and resold for huge money. For example, you like the name, you call and ask about it, and you are answered:
- So, you like torg.ru, do you want to buy it?
- Yes, I like it.
- Million dollars!
Then we decided to find an affordable and short name. ”
So began the way Avito.

Chronology

This section briefly describes the major milestones in Avito development.

2007 - 2008

The first version of Avito, launched on October 15, 2007, provided for the possibility of placing not only private ads, but also auctions of private sellers.

2009

In 2009, the auction was decided to abandon and focus on working with ads.

2010

In 2010, Avito launched a large-scale Avito advertising campaign with the slogan “How much is your mess?”. The monthly audience has increased to 10 million unique visitors. Then there was a moderation of ads. Avito has become possible to view from a mobile phone.

2011

Mobile applications and the “Shops” service were launched, allowing professional sellers to create their own storefronts with goods. Avito entered the TOP-5 of the most visited resources of the Runet.

2012

In 2012, a special section of the Personal Account appeared, providing quick access to pay for Avito additional services and history of operations - Avito Wallet.

2013

The company's business grew, and in 2013, Avito merged with competing ad sites OLX.ru and Slando.ru under the Avito brand. After the transaction, the site entered the top three largest online classifiers in the world. Inside the Avito, the “mycelium” DWH began to grow.

2014

In 2014, the Domofond.ru project was opened, a PRO-office for professional users appeared, and Startup started working. There was a site redesign.

2015

In 2015, an important event occurred - a controlling stake in Avito was sold to the South African holding Naspers. The Avito Context service started working, the Checkout project was included in the company, the opportunity appeared to correspond on the site with the help of Avito Messenger. Services for professionals entered the market - ActiAgent and ActiDealer .

2016

In 2016, Autoteka appeared - a car inspection service via VIN and Avito Subscriptions - a service in which we combined our Avito Shop with the ability to place ads from a renewable package of placements.

2017

In 2017, the search for Avito was updated. A public profile has appeared - this is the personal page of the Avito site user, accessible to all visitors, which contains information about the seller and his ads. In mobile applications, a lot of cool features have been added: search for ads by product photo, Vision for hiding faces and numbers of cars to serve ads, Voice Over, 3D Touch.

Avito today

Tales: not only about technology

The development of each project is associated with different stories: fascinating, funny, or dramatic. Here are some of them.

Support is so harsh

Avito user support specialists are so harsh that they marry and celebrate a wedding without stopping from work! 2011.

About the first recommendations on Avito

Igor K., one of the first Avito developers: “There was a time when we started to make a banner next to the“ submit ads ”button on the entire site, and at that moment I was selling my white apple mouse on Avito. For some time the test banner advertised it :) It’s a pity, there are no pictures left ”.

How the messenger was tempered

Alexander M., the head of the testing team: “The launch of the messenger took place on the very New Year's Eve - everything was overtime, the requirements were collected by the entire technical department.”
Vitaly L., head of server development: “So node.js came to Avito. In 2017, he left Avito, because messenger rewrote on Golang ".

About supermen

Alexander O., test systems developer: “There was a man whom everyone called Superman - he knew all the answers. Now there are more such supermen, but then he was alone and “lamp”. ”

Changes in standards

Vitaly L., head of server development: “The context that appeared in 2015 was the second big project with the service paradigm. It was a "macro" service, with its code base, its database and sphinxes on its servers. He communicated with Avito via API (synchronous over HTTP and asynchronous via rabbit).
At about the same time, we decided to follow the PSR2 coding standards, implemented CodeSniffer checks and began to brush the code. The code is being brushed so far, but we have a standard and we follow it. ”

About professional challenges

Denis K., head of Avito system administration: “The first professional challenge is the migration of equipment, the entire platform, to a Swedish data center from Moscow. A few years later, the law on the storage of personal data in Russia entered into force, and we had to urgently migrate the platform back. By the time she grew tenfold. And it was not so much about the number of servers, but about the parameters that determine the complexity and complexity of the systems. The complexity of the task, I think, gave additional strength to many. "

About processes in work

Vitaly L., head of server development: “Over the years, processes have changed many times - this has to be done with the growth of the team. Those processes that work in a team of 10 people stop working in a team of hundreds of people. One of the most important moments, as it seems to me, is the parallel movement of technologies towards microservices and teams towards cross-functional units. And so on. technologies, and so on. teams, we are moving towards autonomy and decentralization, which is fully consistent with Conway’s law and that allows teams not to slow down, despite their increase by orders of magnitude. ”

About grown up “children” and team trust

Denis K., head of Avito system administration: “The first years in Avito we didn’t have as much experience as now, we didn’t build our systems so steadily and reliably. And we received alarming SMS from our monitoring system five times a night. We had to get up, turn on the laptop and figure out what happened there. My future wife said then that it was as if we had a small child: you calm him down, and then you can sleep a little again.
For many years I was the only system administrator. Now it is a whole unit. In the last couple of years, I was not disturbed at all during off-hours: years passed, the child grew up. In general, I can say about the work in Avito, that I have been carrying the feeling of trusting me all this time. They said to me: “Denis, it's on you, I believe in you”. And I could not let the team down, found ways to do everything to solve the problem. ”

KISS: Keep It Short & Simple

Vitaly L., head of server development: “The basic technologies, approaches and solutions have not changed dramatically. We always follow the KISS principle and try to make simple but effective technical solutions. We used and use PostgreSQL, since we can cook it . We used and use PHP, because It makes it easy to solve our business problems. We used and use Sphinx to search, because it is easy to customize it for our business tasks and for our workloads. Our system for storing user files has been running virtually unchanged since its inception (it was told on Habré). The foundation, which was laid many years ago, continues to work now, when the workload and complexity of the project has increased significantly. ”

On the first line

Vasiliy Ch., Unit leader, product manager Startup: Now in Avito there is an internship program in support service. Developers come to St. Petersburg and work together with user support. We can say that our team was at the forefront of this internship - six months before the start of the general program, we went to St. Petersburg with the whole team in order to get into the spirit, stay close to customers, feel many things on ourselves.

There were a lot of results. Absolutely all the team members said it was cool. One thing is when you have never seen a person personally, and for you it’s just a line in Slack and an avatar, another thing is when you talked to a person, including informally. This is a completely different interaction efficiency. Secondly, our guys began to understand much better what is happening in St. Petersburg, because there is our front office, where people communicate directly with customers. We had a tour of all departments: they were in sales, moderation, support of private traders, pro-support, went around everything that was possible, found out how they all work. ”

Dmitry K., the server side developer: “We not only met, saw how they work, but also drank beer with them in the evening. Now behind each message from the support in the chat is a real person. ”

How to (almost) drown techlide so that everyone envies you

Oleg B., the leading developer of the server part: “We had a yacht corporate party, where we almost drowned the yacht and technical support. Somehow we winded up and nailed with these ropes that the yacht was tilted 90 degrees, and the sail was in the water. It was amusing that at the beginning of the regatta our technical leader said that he did not want to participate in all this, so he would sit with a telephone on the edge, without disturbing anyone. ”

Dmitriy Z., the technical unit of the autoload: “I actually donated my place in the cockpit in favor of the guys. They never sailed, and I did. So it was more fair. "

Oleg B., the leading developer of the server part: “Of course, exactly the edge of the yacht where he was was in the water. Dima bathed his head, but the phone was saved - he managed to lift it above himself.
Of course, we did not win the regatta, but everyone was jealous of us, because no one else had such an extreme adventure. In such a short time, almost to sink a yacht (which was positioned as practically unsinkable) is not given to everyone ”!

Alexander O., developer of testing systems: “And we almost crashed into them on our yacht. I helped keep the sail, our captain was talking on the phone at this time: we see that the yacht is rushing at us, he, without looking up from the conversation, began to sharply turn the yacht, giving me the task to pull the rope or loosen it. Turned around sharply, slightly dipping the edge of the yacht, at the very peak of the turn I was standing, but was located perpendicular to the side of the yacht. The rest of the team clung to the edges and everything worked out. When our captain finished talking, he only said:
- We seem to have nearly crashed here. Well, that cost. "

What is this site avito.ma?

And why did they copy our name? Sometimes these questions are asked by newcomers to our team. Avito.ma is a project that our team began to develop in Morocco in the early 2010s. But then we decided to focus on the Russian market. The site still exists and ranks second among the categories in Morocco. And we have a few photos of team-building, which was held there.

Avito.ma was also in Arabic (from right to left) and thanks to it we spent the whole company several days in Morocco. Thanks to this, Arabic support appeared in Sphinx. And the paintings written in the master class still adorn the office .

Looking to the future

Today Avito is the most popular ad site in Russia. We have tens of thousands of rps to the backend, hundreds of millions of ads in the database, terabytes of pictures in the repository and a powerful system of automated moderation based on machine learning. Every month a quarter of Russia's population uses the project. And in order to view all active announcements about goods and services, it will take 441 days!

What will happen next? One thing is for sure: we will continue to work in order to provide millions of our users with a convenient and reliable platform for the exchange of information. And in this blog we will tell you how we do it and what technologies are used for this.