Rackspace to AWS Cloud Migration with AWS Spot Instances

September 20, 2021 AWS Cloud Cloud Migration 0

Rackspace to AWS Cloud Migration and Ecommerce Migration

Increased Sales, Cut Cloud Costs, Reached 99.9% Uptime

Project Dates

February 2016 – December 2017

Technologies

Cloud Hosting: Rackspace Servers
Ecommerce Platform: Spree Commerce
Blog Platform: WordPress

Company

Reneerouleau.com is a direct to consumer ecommerce brand that sells skin care products across North America. Renée Rouleau is a trusted and sought-after skin care expert and esthetician loved by celebrities, editors, bloggers and skincare obsessives everywhere. Throughout her career, Renée has worked with clients who trust her and demand the utmost in skincare. This makes her the go-to expert for many of today’s most skin enviable personalities including Demi Lovato, Lili Reinhart and Madelaine Petsch. She is also on the advisory board for Woman @ Austin. This is an organization that is on a mission to advance women entrepreneurs striving to grow their companies; and she is a member of the Austin chapter of EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization.)

Challenges

Renee Rouleau was seeking a Devops and Engineering partner with the expertise to manage day-to-day infrastructure administration and provide development support for new releases. Renee’s team was looking for a broad scope of support, skills, and development expertise that made hiring an additional in-house team member challenging and expensive. The company had accrued a backlog of technical debt that they knew needed to be paid down while allowing internal staff to focus on value generation surrounding product innovation and delivery. Gennovacap’s deep domain expertise in Engineering / IT Support and Cloud Migrations offered a clear value proposition to free up precious resources from time-consuming infrastructure management and provided operational enhancements in the form of best practice advice, skills, and tools. Existing challenges included:

Application timeouts during peak selling season created missed sales opportunities
Significant downtime – E-commerce application timeouts and bugs (10 years of tech debt)
Expensive monolithic servers on Rackspace

Objectives

Support all infrastructure and environment modernization (both non-prod and production environments), migrate the blog from Racksapce to AWS (implement autoscaling), redevelop the ecommerce platform, and migrate all products from Spree Commerce to Shopify Plus.

Solutions

Cloud: AWS EC2, Autoscaling, Load Balancers, Spot Instances
Ecommerce Platform: Shopify Plus

Gennovacap’s initial work with Renee began with a simple task to create monitoring services to manage the downtime of both the blog and e-commerce store. Gennovacap began the migration efforts after we informed Renee about the loss of sales due the downtime. Moving to AWS helped Renee leverage the benefits of Amazon Spot Instances without having to manually add servers when website traffic increased. The transition also liberated the company’s internal staff to concentrate on operations while Gennovacap managed all the heavy lifting in its cloud environments.

Benefits

Sales increased 20%

By migrating off the legacy Spree Commerce to Shopify Plus, application stability improved and timeouts during peak selling months fell by 99.9% thereby increasing sales 20%.

Saved $500 /month on hosting

By migrating from expensive monolithic Rackspace servers to AWS EC2, we were able to enable to utilize spot instances and autoscaling to optimize costs and server usage for the 5M monthly blog visitors.