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intro

70% cloud cost optimization for a major UK building materials retailer

E-commerce
1 year, ongoing
Cloud Adoption
Jul 20, 2023
2 min
Navigation
01
About
CMO Group, the UK's largest online building materials retailer, serves homeowners and tradespeople

In 2022, the company achieved £83.1 million in sales and continues to grow annually. As a digital-first business, CMO Group operates 10 websites and strives to ensure their reliability, flexibility, and scalability for holistic customer experience.

Active customers:
182K
Sales in 2022:
£83.1M
SKUs available:
130K
Year-on-year growth:
47%
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Trustmarks
5

Their knowledge of their engineers is amazing. They are very responsive.

Greg F.
Director, Online Marketplace
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challenges

CMO Group faced the following challenges in their work

Lack of control

All the client's sites were hosted in the data center. Communication with the vendor was built through the ticket system. The waiting time for an answer or problem resolution could last days or weeks, no matter how big or small the problem was.

Limited scalability

The client's infrastructure setup with separate servers for sites, its staging environment, database, and database staging led to scalability issues. Since only vertical scaling was possible, handling the increased workload and traffic demands took a lot of work.

Servers overcapacity

Even though the client operates the business in one country and could turn the difference in day and night traffic to their advantage, it wasn't the case. With a regular server, the team paid for max capacity no matter the actual numbers.

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04
Tech stack

Technologies we used

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AWS
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PHP
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Symfony
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RDS for MariaDB
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Elasticache Redis
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DMS
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solutions

We found best-fit solutions for CMO Group’s infrastructure

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AWS migration

Transferring from the data center to the cloud helped the client gain complete control over their infrastructure. Now they can manage, tweak, expand, and adapt any feature to their needs anyhow and anytime.

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Scalability boost with AWS EKS

Minding client's need to unlock horizontal scalability, our team suggested switching to AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service. We complemented this solution by making the application stateless, storing client sessions in Elasticache for Redis, and streamlining CI/CD deployment from Bitbucket to the Kubernetes cluster.

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Spot Instances for cost optimization

Switching from on-demand to AWS spot instances helped to optimize the client's expenses (since its price can be up to 70% lower). To make that possible, our team made the system dynamic and configured it to finalize any requests in 2 minutes or less. So switching from one spot instance to another won't be a problem.

Indicators confirming
our decisions

Scalable infrastructure

High-available infrastructure

Streamlined CI/CD

Cost optimization

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Cut your infrastructure costs

Save more, maintain efficiency

Streamline your infrastructure, while reducing expenses. Achieve cost savings of up to 70% without sacrificing performance.
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07
Why AWS

AWS benefits at a glance

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Easy to use

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.

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Cost-Effective

You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

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Flexible

AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions.

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Reliable

With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.

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Secure

AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.

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Scalable and high-performance

Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.
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