Transforming Cloud Operations with Advanced DevOps Strategies

Industry: Retail & CPG

Delivery Center: CSA

Cloud Operations Transformation with AWS

Industry Context

Staying competitive in the dynamic landscape of the retail industry today demands continual innovation and optimization across all aspects of operations. With consumers increasingly turning to online platforms for their shopping needs, retailers must ensure their digital presence is robust, agile, and cost-effective. They are thus compelled to enhance their IT infrastructure to not only support their traditional operations but also expand their ecommerce endeavors.

Client Challenge

Our client PriceSmart is a leading shopping membership club in Central America, Colombia, and the Caribbean, dedicated to offering high-quality items at low prices while supporting community initiatives through Price Philanthropies. PriceSmart sought to enhance its IT infrastructure to support its expansive retail and e-commerce operations, aiming for improved release management, system reliability, and cost efficiency. The challenges were multifaceted: streamlining the release process, adopting modern deployment strategies for enhanced safety and recovery, upgrading their Kubernetes infrastructure, and optimizing cloud costs. These improvements were crucial for maintaining PriceSmart's leadership in the retail sector and continuing to provide exceptional value to its members.

Approach

Encora, partnering with PriceSmart, spearheaded a comprehensive cloud operations strategy. To exceed the outlined client challenges, we leveraged the AWS platform due to its comprehensive suite of services, scalability, security features, and robust support for modern deployment strategies, enabling efficient and reliable operations. The services we deployed include:

Release Management: Migrated PriceSmart's release pipelines to a new Jenkins installation, enhancing the efficiency and reliability of their software delivery process.

Continuous Delivery: Implemented a GitOps approach using Flux for continuous delivery, coupled with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), facilitating automated, reliable, and secure application deployments.

Cloud Architecture & Engineering: Assisted PriceSmart in upgrading their Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters to the latest Kubernetes version, ensuring the platform's scalability, security, and performance were state-of-the-art.

DevSecOps in Cloud: Introduced blue/green deployment strategies to significantly improve PriceSmart's release safety and disaster recovery capabilities, minimizing downtime and risk during updates.

Cloud Optimization: Developed a new design for the website's catalog functionality using AWS serverless technologies - AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) - enhancing scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency. Encora's automation solutions for fine-tuning Lambda concurrency led to significant cost savings, optimizing serverless operations without compromising service quality.

AWS Services

Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service (EKS)

AWS Lambda

Amazon Simple
Storage Service (S3)

AWS Step Functions

Amazon DynamoDB

AWS Secrets Manager

Amazon Simple
Queue Service (SQS)

Results

PriceSmart's strategic enhancements in cloud operations and infrastructure, facilitated by Encora's expertise and AWS's robust services, underscore a successful digital transformation. This initiative not only solidified PriceSmart's position as a leader in the retail industry but also set new standards for efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in cloud computing practices. Outcomes included:

Enhanced operational efficiency with the adoption of a GitOps approach and the migration of release pipelines to a new Jenkins setup that resulted in reduction in the time required for new feature deployments. This enhanced PriceSmart’s capability to rapidly introduce updates and innovations.
Improved deployment safety through implementation of blue/green deployment strategies. PriceSmart witnessed a 90% decrease in deployment-related service disruptions, significantly improving system uptime and ensuring smoother, risk-minimized updates.
Modernized online presence and optimized performance through the redesign of the catalog functionality with AWS serverless technologies, which also only modernized PriceSmart's online presence but also optimized performance and costs.
Optimized cost in serverless computing expenses with the targeted automation and optimization of serverless operations, particularly AWS Lambda functions.