AC3 delivers re-architectured migration for a Major Australian Retailer

AC3 worked with a major Australian retailer on a project that helped them transform their retail strategy, gain agility and uncover new revenue opportunities, by migrating and optimising their environment on AWS Cloud.

What was the challenge?

For this retailer, a pivotal event for their business is their annual toy sale. They hold their toy sale both in-store and online but found their online presence unable to cope with the huge customer demand.

Despite planning the sale for months, the retailer’s online infrastructure was unable to scale to meet the significant spike in traffic and ran the risk of downtime throughout the course of the event. This led to missed sales and potential reputation damage.

Despite their strong online presence and dedication to maximising sales, they identified that they needed to bring in another level of cloud expertise to help them make 2018’s toy sale the gold standard in online sales campaigns.

What was the solution?

AC3 was chosen to help this Australian retailer with their online platform redesign. AC3’s consultants worked with the retailer’s internal technical team to determine the existing implementation processes, pain points and risks.

From this initial scope, AC3 were able to produce a solution architecture and design. This facilitated the re-architected migration of their online solution from a third-party product offering to the cloud (AWS).

As part of the delivery phase, AC3 worked together with key stakeholders to enable the AWS-based solution, with autoscaling and High Availability (HA), as well as to implement deployment automation capabilities.

AC3 replaced the existing unresponsive legacy systems with AWS components and services including:

• EC2, ECS, Autoscaling and Application Load Balancers
• Aurora RDS, S3
• Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail
• And many others
• CloudFormation and automated image management were used to manage the patching and promotion of build and deployment artefacts through environments. This delivered repeatable results and the essential stability required for a mission-critical digital commerce channel.

What were the benefits?

Seamless transition

This Australian retailer was able to migrate their pivotal infrastructure to AWS seamlessly, without compromising customer experience. This has enabled digital to become one of their primary sales channels and one which can be relied upon to provide a significant contribution to their bottom line.

Cost Optimisation

Thanks to the AWS migration project, they were able to unlock an approximate saving of 47% on infrastructure spend. Much of this has been delivered through database performance enhancements as well as the dynamic scalability that the public cloud enables.

Scalability

Due to the success of this retailer’s online platform, it has been architected and migrated to AWS leveraging the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. They are able to scale to accommodate rapid spikes in traffic during key sales campaigns.

Disaster Recovery

As the retailer’s toy sale continues to grow and evolve every year, they required an ‘always on’ architecture design, achieved by using AWS’ multiple availability zones to ensure an automated approach to not only scalability, but disaster recovery in the event of a major service impact.

Ongoing Support

As an AC3 DevOps Enablement Support customer, they have a trusted cloud partner in AC3. AC3 implemented comprehensive deployment automation, scaling, alerting and monitoring, which has enabled them to enjoy the peace of mind that comes with having 24/7 support.