Michalina Staszewska
The client operates a popular online drugstore with more than 260 stationary stores nationwide. The company has enjoyed consumer confidence for many years, and its success has been supported by numerous awards in the competition for the strongest consumer brand in Poland. The company prides itself on its unique approach to customers, as evidenced by numerous awards in the area of service quality, attesting to the professionalism of the store’s employees, as well as the comfort of shopping. The company is constantly evolving, conducting consumer research, following market trends and looking for new ways to meet the needs and expectations of consumers. Such a dynamic brand needed the help of specialists to keep up and meet all expectations.
The client had complex technical issues related to the correct design and proper optimization of its environment. The existing hindrances directly affected the smoothness of the site and its proper functioning, which consequently hindered the comfortable use of the online store and the processing of consumer orders. Running a thriving online business, the client did not want to allow the problem to escalate and create further difficulties related to the functioning of the site.
The first difficulty was suboptimal and inefficient infrastructure. Another problem, already mentioned above, was the lack of infrastructure scalability. The next challenge we faced was to improve security policies.
In order to effectively fix the existing liquidity and performance problems of the client’s site, we performed an analysis of the company’s existing operations and existing systems. It was necessary to take a holistic approach to solving the problem and apply a wide range of measures, including the years of experience of Qlos specialists.
In order to eliminate the company’s problems, a new server architecture had to be designed, as moving the existing architecture to AWS was not an optimal solution. Adding to the complexity were a number of additional requirements we had to meet, including the migration of the production stack from Magento1 to Magento2, the use of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Varnish Cache. So we created a new AWS infrastructure, according to completely different standards.
In addition, we have made improvements in the disposition of resources between different services, this means that the amount of resources needed per site user is now much less to achieve the same or even better UX effect for the shopper.
We have also designed a separate environment for the application development and testing process that accurately reflects the production infrastructure, which is a great convenience for developers and testers, as well as for the team of administrators responsible for implementing the new version of the application. All this while using a minimum amount of resources, and thus generating a small cost for the customer.
Moving the environment to AWS and using auto-scaling groups has significantly reduced costs through financial engineering. Putting up a new spot instance is only 1/10 the price of the cost of a regular instance.
Customers don’t experience overload on the site, making the shopping experience seamless.
Strengthening the security of the client’s site is also an important effect. Thanks to our actions, intermediate problems disappeared, thus improving the overall security of the application as well as the UX of the store’s customers.
