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Helping a global beauty leader make the move from on-prem to cloud with AWS
Find out how we helped our beauty sector client architect for the cloud with AWS.
Requirements for moving from on-prem to cloud with AWS
- Mentor engineering staff on SLDC practices in a cloud-native environment.
- Increase runway and release frequency for ecommerce.
- Relocate infrastructure from an on-prem data centre to a cloud-native environment.
- An integrated approach for an array of tools (mix of SaaS and on-prem) to meet business and technology objectives.
Industry: Beauty
Tools: CloudFormation scripting, Docker containerisation, various Amazon services
Number of employees: 62,000
Results at a glance
Adaptavist is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, so our client benefited from our well-architected approach on the platform.
Well-architected cloud-native infrastructure exploring AWS patterns and services.
Increased reliability and performance for cloud-native SDLC and ways of working.
A CI/CD pipeline with a focus on security for non-production and production e-commerce.
Managed services have reduced operation and ownership costs.
Consistent infrastructure and release patterns across all environments – from production to unit testing stacks.
Ability to recreate and tear down an environment at will.
About the customer
Our client is a global leader in prestige beauty, with a diverse portfolio of over 20 brands. Its makeup, skincare, fragrance, and haircare products are sold in around 150 countries. Beauty is big business – in 2022, the organisation’s revenue exceeded $17 billion.
Customer challenge
Like many consumer brands, our client had seen an acceleration of online activity in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic – with online sales up in every region by at least 50 percent. For the organisation, this has meant a continued investment in e-commerce capabilities, supply chain improvements, and IT.
For our client to meet its board’s increasing growth demands and stay nimble in the face of increased online competition, it became even more critical that applications were being developed efficiently and securely. However, they were facing software development life cycle challenges, particularly in the delivery environment, hindering new development efforts in Amazon Web Services (AWS). On top of this, development teams were hitting resource limitations and experiencing regular disruptions due to their on-premise development practices, resulting in long runway and release times.
At this point, our client was outsourcing the majority of its technical operations, and had already engaged two previous partners to help them move their production infrastructure to AWS, neither providing a satisfactory solution. They wanted to understand the root cause of the issues they were facing and also needed to determine how best to leverage the AWS environment to reduce release time. The client leverages an array of tools from AWS, Atlassian (Jira and BitBucket), and Jenkins, creating another challenge. They needed an integrated approach to meet business and technology objectives.
Our solution
One of the big challenges revolved around cultural change. The client was operating with a legacy mindset, believing systems architected 15 years ago would still suffice without being reenvisioned for the cloud. We were able to overcome those challenges by instituting a cloud-native mindset, professing the mantra of treating servers as ‘cattle not pets’. All stacks and their configuration were designed to be ephemeral. The entire infrastructure was built with CloudFormation scripting, utilising common cloud computing best practices while incorporating a long list of AWS services.
For example, their build and release scripts ran in Jenkins but still required manual intervention, configuration and/or reconfiguration of the target server. We re-architected the entire stack to be an IaC build, using CloudFormation. This provided a more consistent, reliable way to manage the environment and a more predictable cloud deployment process.
For that initial engagement, we created a MVP prototype, which did away with the resource limitations they were facing. We deployed their legacy Drupal-based ecommerce solution using a combination of CloudFormation to deploy the container service and that application in AWS for their development team to use, and then we moved from that deployment into their production environment.
AWS services used in the solution
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CodeCommit
- AWS RDS (Relational Database Service)
- AWS EC2 and ECS (Elastic Container Service)
- AWS Certificate Manager
- AWS ALB (Application Load Balancer)
- AWS CodePipeline
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS EFS (Elastic File System)
- AWS AutoScaling
- AWS SystemsManager
The results
Adapativst is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, so our client could benefit from our well-architected approach on the platform. These competencies include skills on CloudFormation, CodePipeline, and other common AWS services, along with mentoring their engineers to shift towards a cloud-centred development and execution environment.
We introduced AWS well-architected patterns to enhance reliability and performance for cloud-native SDLC using CI/CD with a focus on security. Our client now has an enhanced and secure CI/CD pipeline for non-production and production ecommerce.
We’ve also increased the reliability of their e-commerce platform, preventing a single point of failure and enabling them to handle the 200–300 sales per minute some of their brands are experiencing.
Since this phase of work has been completed, Adaptavist has only had minimal interaction with these production solutions, a testament to their success.
Find out more
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