AWS Cloud Migration for Leading Tire Provider Online Shop
Tires-Easy is a US-based tire provider headquartered in California, catering to its customers since 2004, and establishing itself as a main player on the tire market. They operate a very large and complex online shop that also offers delivery services. The 1100+ warehouses spread across the country give Tires-Easy a competitive advantage over their competitors, being able to ship products to the customer’s homes or local tire installers in record time.
Our collaboration started in 2014 and has grown ever since, working together as a closely-knit unit on both the development, as well as the DevOps, Cloud and maintenance side.
THE CHALLENGE
THE CHALLENGE
Back in 2016 Tires-Easy was confronted with the issues generated by a basic infrastructure that did not offer enough flexibility, security and scalability for a growing eCommerce business.
After careful analysis we decided together that a migration to a new infrastructure was the best option, so we proceeded to moving their application to a dedicated infrastructure from Rackspace. This allowed the business to continue its growth in a high availability environment, with improved security and more up-to-date maintenance and managed services processes.
Reaching a mature stage, Tires-Easy entered a stabilization phase and certain patterns in the customer behavior started to emerge. Being in the tires business, it was clear that there would be certain sales peaks, when the customers were purchasing winter or summer gear. They wanted to reduce infrastructure costs, while also keeping performance at high levels.
As a consequence, the natural approach to infrastructure was to go for an auto scalable architecture that would accommodate these peaks, perform optimally during high demand seasons, use less resources when the demand was lower, and keep costs in sync.
In addition, the hardware they were running on started to become obsolete and have performance issues.
THE SOLUTION
The solution the evozon Cloud team proposed to address these concerns was migration to AWS Cloud. The migration would solve all major challenges Tires-Easy was confronted with.
We set up an auto scalable infrastructure that would solve the seasonality challenge. More resources would be used to maintain performance at optimal levels when the demand was sky-rocketing, while less busy months would run on less resources. This approach reduced the infrastructure costs with 50%, because they wouldn’t spend the same amount during peak seasons and less busy months, as they did before migrating to AWS.
To make sure the migration went as smooth as possible given the complexity of the business, we devised a plan that would establish every single aspect of the migration.
The plan would follow the “assess-mobilize-migrate-and-modernize” framework, and the initial analysis phase had the role of mapping all the factors we needed to pay attention to. After careful observation we moved on to the planning phase, then the migration phase.
A major challenge was the size of the databases and the amount of product photos. Another one was the number of 3rd party integrations with providers and distributors, which we needed to configure. Together with the customer we found the best time-frame to perform the migration, so the impact on the business would be minimal.
The last phase was the modernization phase, where with the help of the AWS services we managed to considerably improve security, CI/CD pipelines, and the automation of tasks.
KEY OUTCOMES
- Cost Savings: Autoscaling allowed resource allocation optimization based on demand. By automatically scaling down during periods of low traffic or workload, unnecessary resource costs were reduced by 50%. Conversely, scaling up during peak periods ensured performance requirements were met without investing in excessive resources. This cost optimization lead to significant savings in infrastructure expenses.
- High Availability and Reliability: The autoscalable infrastructure enhances the availability and reliability of the eshop. By distributing your workload across multiple instances and automatically replacing failed instances, it minimized downtime and ensured continuous operation. This high availability translated to improved service reliability, reduced business disruption, and increased customer trust.
- Improved Agility: An autoscalable infrastructure provided the agility needed to respond quickly to changing business requirements. As user demand fluctuated, the infrastructure automatically scaled up or down, ensuring that the online shop handled the load effectively. This agility allowed Tires-Easy to adapt rapidly to market dynamics, scale operations efficiently, and stay competitive.
- Scalable Growth: Autoscaling enabled Tires-Easy to scale seamlessly as it grew. This scalability allows them to accommodate more users, support business expansion, and capture new market opportunities without concerns about infrastructure limitations.
- Enhanced Performance and User Experience: By scaling resources dynamically, the customer could maintain optimal response times, reduce latency, and prevent performance bottlenecks. This enhanced performance lead to improved user experience, higher customer satisfaction, increased engagement, and better conversion rates.
