Migrate to the AWS cloud for greater scalability, performance, and security

Challenge

Scalability as the biggest challenge

Scalability was the biggest challenge for the online retailer. Website traffic fluctuated, especially after TV advertising campaigns and during events such as Black Friday.
With over 3 million car parts in the catalog and 10,000 packages shipped daily, demand for servers was high. Every morning, the company has to update the website’s item feed—a single file containing inventory data, prices, and product details. This important maintenance task is necessary to keep the website up to date, but due to server limitations, it took 4 to 5 hours.
Not all of the demand on the servers came from website interactions or normal operations. The company was also plagued daily by automated bots that scoured the website for price data and product details. In addition, it was sometimes the target of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which put additional strain on the infrastructure.
The company attempted to improve scalability by deploying additional cloud servers and integrating them into the local service. However, this approach proved ineffective. The hybrid solution tested did not meet the technical requirements. Therefore, it was concluded that migrating to the cloud was the best course of action.

Solution approach

Faster deployments for DevOps and growth through Infrastructure as Code

The company already had a small number of workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and had worked well with SPIRIT/21 on previous projects. So it made sense for SPIRIT/21 AWS-Partner to assist with the migration. The migration was planned by identifying the components of the existing solution and mapping them to the user stories for the system on AWS. The project team agreed on a lift-and-shift approach to ensure speed and minimal changes or disruptions.
To achieve better scalability, SPIRIT/21 recommended Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which allows the company to add or remove computing capacity to meet changing requirements.
This allowed the provider to set a minimum and maximum number of virtual instances for the e-commerce website. The service could then automatically scale the application up or down as demand increased or decreased.
To address the issues with bots and DDoS attacks, the automotive provider implemented AWS WAF on its new platform, giving it a web application firewall that protects against common web exploits and bots that can impact availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. It also uses Amazon GuardDuty to detect threats using machine learning (ML). ML-powered analysis provides insights into unusual or suspicious activity and gives time to respond to potential threats to stability and performance.

Working with AWS also enables the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to quickly provision new instances. This improves performance and failover management, while also increasing disaster recovery capabilities and redundancy. With the help of IaC, the company’s DevOps team can quickly set up environments for new product innovations or to support growth. SPIRIT/21 has implemented a pipeline for continuous integration and continuous deployment with Terraform Infrastructure as Code, allowing the entire architecture to be replicated within a few hours. This also makes it easier for the customer to scale when, for example, expanding into another market.

The result

Improved scalability and security, and up to 80% higher system performance

The migration went smoothly and resulted in a planned downtime of only two hours for the transfer of the company database to AWS. By December 2023, the company had completely transitioned to AWS, with all business-critical systems running in the cloud.
The migration to AWS has significantly reduced costs compared to hosting in a local data center. The company no longer needs to maintain oversized servers to handle occasional spikes in demand—thanks to Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, it now only pays for the resources it actually uses. System performance has improved significantly. The daily update of the product feed, which previously took up to 5 hours, now takes only 1 to 2 hours with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – an increase of up to 80 percent.
With Amazon GuardDuty and WAF, the provider is confident that bot activity and DDoS incidents can be managed, and its security team is proactively notified of threats using ML. Since the migration, there has been a decline in bot activity and no more DDoS incidents.