FASHIOLA and its Dutch platform, Kleding, aggregates online offers from a wide range of fashion brands and multi-brand stores. The fashion search engine helps users find specific pieces, then redirects them to online stores for purchase. FASHIOLA has partnered with over 100 online shops. The company was founded in 2012 in the Netherlands and is based in Pozuelo de Alarcon, Spain. The platform is present in twenty-three countries and receives more than 70 million visits per year.
FASHIOLA was struggling with an aging on-premises infrastructure and needed to migrate to AWS to obtain a more efficient and secure infrastructure. Benjamín Hernández, Senior Developer, FASHIOLA, explained, “We had a product very anchored in the past. Our physical servers were unreliable and prone to error.”
Additionally, FASHIOLA’s on-premises infrastructure included large databases that were in older, customized versions, no longer supported by Amazon RDS, which added complexity to their migration. FASHIOLA needed a partner to re-architect and migrate various databases and services to AWS, including RabbitMQ, MariaDB, Apache Solr, and multiple microservices hosted on-premises.
FASHIOLA required the agility of the cloud to remain competitive in the ever-changing and evolving fashion industry. Additionally, the company needed to make the move quickly, without suspending service, which would result in an economic loss for FASHIOLA.
F. Javier Pérez Requejo, CTO, FASHIOLA, had previously worked with Netrix at another organization and, because of the proven success rate, decided to partner with us again. Netrix presented a project plan that allowed FASHIOLA to tackle the migration in phases, learning along the way and adapting to the new environment.
“We were most confident in Netrix from the first moment,” said Mr. Pérez Requejo.
Netrix was able to create a strong foundation for FASHIOLA that allows the company to continue developing their platform, Kleding, using AWS best practices By implementing robotize solutions, FASHIOLA gained automation and standardization that sped up their AWS migration, modernization, and monitoring processes.
Netrix implemented Robotize Control Tower as an account organization tool that allows the creation and management of AWS accounts using infrastructure-as-code. Robotize Control Tower works for multi-account and multi-environment clients to save time by minimizing engineering and implementation efforts.
Robotize Control Tower allowed Netrix to generate different environments in the shortest possible time as well as make required customizations to create a hierarchy of accounts according to FASHIOLA’s needs. All accounts are orchestrated under the Robotize Control Tower umbrella, which is responsible for efficiently organizing accounts and securing them all with policy enforcement to prevent any incidents.
Netrix also implemented Robotize EKS, an all-in-one solution that facilitates the implementation of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Clusters for any application to run in a containerized, automated, more secure, and cost-efficient way. Robotize EKS supports the deployment of FASHIOLA’s own applications, microservices, and third-party applications, which can include Prometheus or different Kubernetes operators.
Robotize EKS handles container management and automation, as well as bootstrapping of the Kubernetes managed cluster (Amazon EKS) where multiple services are installed and configured automatically, such as the External Secrets manager to interact with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Amazon RDS was also used to store the information used by FASHIOLA’s applications, including large volumes of data with a history of several years.
Netrix’s robust team of AWS-certified cloud engineers enabled FASHIOLA to migrate to AWS and achieve the scalability and resiliency benefits of the cloud. With a new, optimized architecture designed by Netrix, FASHIOLA now has an efficient and secure AWS infrastructure to support their business.
FASHIOLA’s new infrastructure achieved a 10% reduction in latency between the client and the application.
“Being able to scale our servers on the capacity, power, etc. that we need in each of our phases and in the years to come will give us much greater ability to do things in a simpler way,” said Mr. Pérez Requejo.
With the implementation of Robotize EKS, Netrix was able to reduce the deployment time to a third of the initial estimate and complete the full migration 15 days sooner than planned. The migration was complete in less than two and a half months and Netrix avoided any downtime, allowing FASHIOLA to continue operating during the transformation.
“The initial deadline was three months, and thanks to Netrix’s professionalism, we were able to complete it without any problem. If someone needs to migrate their infrastructure completely to the cloud, I would 100% recommend Netrix, especially Robotize Control Tower and Robotize EKS because it helps a lot in the process to have everything ready in a matter of a few weeks,” said Mr. Hernández.
The use of tools such as Terraform and Infracost helped considerably with the management of infrastructure costs in AWS, improving and optimizing the consumption of services. That, paired with the re-architecture of microservices in Kubernetes, led to cost reductions of nearly 50% over on-premises expesnses in less than a month.
FASHIOLA’s costs were further reduced through the use of Reserved Instances and Spot Instances. For example, Reserved Instances were used for Amazon EKS worker-nodes and Spot Instances for development environments. These same development environments are also stopped at night thanks to auto-scaling policies, further minimizing costs.
FASHIOLA was using an older version of MariaDB, no longer supported by Amazon RDS. The Netrix engineering team used a tool developed by Netrix to include migration of AUTO_INCREMENTAL attributes for each of the database tables.
With more than 6 TB of data to migrate, there were billions of rows per table in the databases. Each test required a considerable investment of time. Using Performance Insights and Amazon RDS functionality, Netrix was able to view and detect each error and correct them throughout various phases of the project while also carefully analyzing the data’s integrity and behavior. Netrix completed the migration process with a definitive cutover and transfer of knowledge to the client.
FASHIOLA’s re-architected environment has created a faster path to innovation and a new capability to generate Machine Learning pipelines for predictive patterns and failure forecasting. The company can also continue to implement improvements in security and compliance: AWS IAM Identity Center, Service Control Policies (SCPs), among others.
“We had worked with other partners in the past, and the collaboration with Netrix has been much better, much more beneficial,” concluded Mr. Hernández.
No matter what challenge you’re facing today, our team of technical experts can get you started on a path to a better solution. We’ll partner with you to:
