Scalable Core Infrastructure for a Leading Online Fashion Retailer
E-commerce & Retail // Re-architecting the core infrastructure to handle massive traffic spikes, improve performance, and enable rapid feature deployment for a top fashion e-commerce platform.
Infrastructure
Scalability
E-commerce
AWS
Performance
Timeline
18 Months
Environment
AWS
Core Mission
Build a resilient, scalable, and automated infrastructure foundation.
Our Role
Principal Engineer, Core Infrastructure
The Challenge
- Frequent outages during high-traffic events like Black Friday, leading to significant revenue loss.
- Slow and manual infrastructure provisioning process, hindering developer velocity.
- Monolithic architecture made it difficult to deploy and scale features independently.
- Lack of deep observability into system performance, making troubleshooting difficult.
The Approach
Stabilization & Observability
- Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting with Datadog.
- Identified and resolved critical performance bottlenecks in the existing infrastructure.
- Established an on-call rotation and incident response process.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
- Migrated all infrastructure management to Terraform to ensure consistency and repeatability.
- Built a robust CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins for automated testing and deployments.
- Leveraged Docker to containerize applications for portability and scalability.
Re-architecture & Scalability
- Designed and implemented a highly available, auto-scaling architecture on AWS.
- Broke down key parts of the monolith into microservices.
- Introduced caching layers (Redis, Varnish) to dramatically improve application performance.
What We Built
Infrastructure
- VPC and Network Design
- Auto-scaling Groups for EC2
- Managed RDS and ElastiCache
- Immutable Infrastructure patterns
Automation
- Terraform module library
- Automated blue-green deployment pipeline
- Container orchestration scripts
Performance
- Centralised Logging with ELK stack
- Distributed Tracing implementation
- Performance monitoring dashboards
Outcomes
Achieved 99.99% uptime during peak holiday shopping seasons.
Reduced average page load time from 5 seconds to under 1 second.
Decreased deployment time from hours to minutes.
Enabled the engineering team to ship features 4x faster.
Reduced infrastructure costs by 20% through optimised auto-scaling.
Tech & Tools
AWS
EC2
RDS
S3
Terraform
Docker
Jenkins
Datadog
Redis
Varnish
Key Principles
- Design for Failure
- Infrastructure as Code is Non-Negotiable
- Automate Toil Away
- You Build It, You Run It
Ready to Transform Your Business?
Don't let technology challenges hold you back. Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation to discover how we can help you build a scalable and resilient digital foundation.