Executive Overview
Our client is a large e-retailer. On the technology front, the company is undergoing a remarkable transformation by migrating data center operations from on-prem to AWS. They plan to run their e-commerce platform on AWS to optimize costs and scale seasonally based on demand during annual commencement cycles.
Business Challenges
As a company engaged in preserving some of the most cherished moments and memories of students and their families, the customer’s business is highly seasonal which stresses their IT infrastructure during the peak school/college sessions while experiencing low e-commerce activity during holidays. Additionally, the aging IT infrastructure led to frequent system outages and was susceptible to intrusions that negatively impacted the end customer experience. They were looking for a robust and secure solution that would allow them to scale out rapidly to handle heavy traffic, without the need to maintain a dedicated data center running at 100% capacity.
Additionally, to stay competitive the customer was looking for a solution that would utilize AI/ML in image recognition clubbed with their trove of 100+ years of students’ pictures to create and launch new products and features in memorabilia space and enable business growth.
They were looking for a partner that could modernize internal systems and tools without disrupting the infrastructure, agents, or their support personnel.
Our Solution
Magento Migration to AWS
To prepare their existing on-prem application for migration to AWS, the SixthUp team audited, understood, and re-architected the application blueprint using a cloud native architecture. The account structure was broken into an environment-based organization with SCPs attached to each OU. A requirement was zero downtime when switching the traffic from on prem to AWS. The SixthUp migration team configured the network and security architecture in AWS and followed it by setting up secure VPN tunnels connecting various customer sites to AWS and added network redundancy to ensure no single point of failure.
Additionally, the team migrated Magento to clustered EC2 servers spread across AZs and regions to provide resilience against any single AWS AZ or region outage while reducing latency experienced by users by routing their requests to the optimal AWS region.
The MySQL DBs were migrated to Aurora to reduce DB administration overheads, provide scalability, and resilience, and optimize costs further.
The SixthUp DevOps team configured infrastructure automation to cater to the scalability requirements of the architecture. Automated pipelines were introduced for application enhancements to support development, automated testing, and production deployments. Monitoring and alerting were implemented to ensure notifications to stakeholders in case of system resources crossed threshold capacity values and validate that automated scaling was properly functioning.
Impact/ Key Benefits to the Client
With their key e-commerce application migrated to the AWS cloud, the customer’s IT and the networking team were able to adjust the infrastructure capacity to meet their seasonal spikes. We further helped the customer build a data lake to add insights to the huge image database.
Additionally, the customer was able to leverage SixthUp’s globally located teams to take advantage of the time zone overlaps with our delivery centers in South Africa and India providing after-hours work and SRE.
