Online retailer of running shoes, clothing, and outdoor gear SportsShoes.com has moved to the cloud. The company tapped Devoteam to help migrate workloads and data from their on-premise legacy data centre to AWS (Amazon Web Services).
SportsShoes.com looks to provide a market-leading online shopping experience and helps their customers make the best product choices to reach their fitness goals. In order to meet the increasing demand on their in-house data systems, the retailer migrated their fulfilment application to AWS. This move was made various significant improvements to the platform.
Migrating databases
The old system used by the retailer was made up of several different applications running on the same network and physical hosts with varying hardware specifications. This setup had minimal monitoring and alerting integrations, which made diagnosing issues a headache.
This is where Devoteam stepped in. The goal of the project was to migrate the legacy system to AWS. SportsShoes.com already had some of their workloads on AWS and was happy to move the rest of their system to the cloud using the same platform.
The components of the on-premise legacy system, consisting of web and cron applications, were containerised and put on to AWS using the ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service). This allowed each part of the system to be behind its own service, allowing close monitoring and health checks.
The teams also used the AWS Database Migration Service, which allowed them to copy historical data and replicate future data changes. They then used a special AWS VPN to achieve communications between on-premises, third-party, and AWS components.
Now SportsShoes.com enjoys a centralised location for infrastructure and application logs. The retailer also now has dashboards and alerts through CloudWatch metrics, which notify the operations team of any errors.
The results
The result of this project is a more stable and scalable environment for SportsShoes.com, in which automated monitoring and alerting capabilities have made things easier and more efficient. Cloud technology is also most cost effective and more flexible, allowing the teams to scale resources as needed to meet fluctuations in customer demand.
The introduction of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) transformed the deployment process, enabling quicker and more consistent deployments across environments. SportsShoes.com now benefits from running on a modern, cloud architecture that is resilient, scalable, and easier to manage. The system has decreased downtime and made deployment quicker, which means more sales.
Ultimately, AWS (and cloud solutions in general) helps empower businesses with enhanced agility, allowing them to innovate faster and focus on their core business rather than fussing around with infrastructure issues. Running everything with on-premises servers is not only expensive, but can lead to technical problems and more vulnerability to cybersecurity threats.