Infrastructure Creation for a Major UK Online Building Materials Retailer

Industry: Retail
Service: AWS Migration
Duration: Ongoing for 1+ year

About Project
CMO Group is the UK's largest online building materials retailer selling 100,000 products to over 182,000 active customers. Serving homeowners and tradespeople, the company made £76.3 million in sales in 2021 and keeps growing about 47% year-on-year. Being a digital-first proposition, the company operates 10 websites that must be reliable, flexible, and scalable to provide the best experience to customers.

182,000

active customers

100,000

available products

£76.3M

in sales in 2021

Client's Goals
Migrate to AWS to gain complete control over the infrastructure
Gain flexibility and scalability for all sites while optimizing costs
Client's Challenges

Lack of Control

All the client's sites were hosted in the data center. Communication with the vendor was built through the ticket system. The waiting time for an answer or problem resolution could last days or weeks, no matter how big or small the problem was.

Limited Scalability

The client's infrastructure setup with separate servers for sites, its staging environment, database, and database staging led to scalability issues. Since only vertical scaling was possible, handling the increased workload and traffic demands took a lot of work.

Servers Overcapacity

Even though the client operates the business in one country and could turn the difference in day and night traffic to their advantage, it wasn't the case. With a regular server, the team paid for max capacity no matter the actual numbers.

Certifications
We keep deepening the expertise to meet your highest expectations and build even more innovative software
OpsWorks Co. Solution

AWS Migration

Transferring from the data center to the cloud helped the client gain complete control over their infrastructure. Now they can manage, tweak, expand, and adapt any feature to their needs anyhow and anytime.

AWS EKS

Minding client's need to unlock horizontal scalability, our team suggested switching to AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service. We complemented this solution by making the application stateless, storing client sessions in Elasticache for Redis, and streamlining CI/CD deployment from Bitbucket to the Kubernetes cluster.

Spot Instances

Switching from on-demand to AWS spot instances helped to optimize the client's expenses (since its price can be up to 70% lower). To make that possible, our team made the system dynamic and configured it to finalize any requests in 2 minutes or less. So switching from one spot instance to another won't be a problem.

Results and Benefits
Scalable Infrastructure
Streamlined CI/CD
High-available Infrastructure
Cost Optimization
Technologies we use