More and more, e-commerce businesses turn to serverless and cost-efficient hosting solutions from AWS, often combining CloudFront with S3, alongside other AWS services and third party APIs.

Let’s take a real-life example: a common challenge encountered in e-commerce is the graceful conclusion of a ‘flash sales’ event on a predefined date and time. Ensuring a seamless transition as these sales come to an end, is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and fostering long-term loyalty.

In this case you want to avoid website redeployments or server-side changes. You could make use of a simple URL redirect ‘toggle switch’.
Enter AWS’s power at the edge : AWS CloudFront Functions and CloudFront KeyValueStore!

This blog post will explore how I used this simple, yet powerful (and new!) KeyValueStore feature to redirect users after sales end, without server-side headaches or code changes.

Creating a Seamless User Experience with CloudFront Functions :

CloudFront Functions brings computation to the edge, closer to the user, which results in lightning-fast execution. By attaching a function to my CloudFront distribution and linking it to a KeyValueStore, I could easily manage the flash sales states with minimal effort. The function checks a value in the KeyValueStore and if it’s “off,” users are redirected to a “Sale Ended” page.

As you can see in the screenshot of the Cloudfront Functions code, it is pretty straightforward to request the value of a key and then use it in your function logic.

Now you can use the value of the “Sales” KeyValue in your function logic.
This example performs a redirect when the Flash Sales has ended :

You can probably discover other use cases or solutions built upon this feature, such as A/B testing, feature flags or access authorization based on data stored in the KeyValueStore.

Stay tuned for more posts, where I’ll dive deeper into the benefits of AWS serverless technologies, helping you tap into the potential of the cloud for your e-commerce and other application needs!

Do not underestimate the power of AWS Cloudfront Functions: it has supersonic execution times for your Viewer requests and Viewer Responses. Think about cache-key and header manipulation, access authorization at the Edge. And as mentioned, nifty URL rewrite and redirect capabilities.

In one of my upcoming blog posts, I will be adding more functionalities to Cloudfront/S3 web applications. So don’t miss out on the insights – follow our blog and join me on this journey to unlock the full potential of serverless architectures with AWS!

Conclusion:

CloudFront Functions and KeyValueStore simplify redirection after flash sales, showcasing the potency of edge computing.

The post Enhancing redirect strategies with AWS CloudFront Functions and KeyValueStore appeared first on Cloudar.

#1 The broadest & deepest

AWS boasts the broadest and deepest capabilities for Windows of any cloud provider, with nearly twice as many Windows Server Instances compared to its closest competitor. It also offers the widest range of cloud services tailored for Microsoft technologies, seamlessly integrated within a cohesive ecosystem. This includes an array of compute, database, application, and deployment services, along with a comprehensive set of management tools, providing a solution for all your business requirements.

#2 Greater reliability & performance

With 77 Availability Zones (AZ) spread across 24 regions, the AWS Cloud guarantees that your workloads remain operational and accessible precisely when you need them. Customers can reduce their unplanned downtime by a whopping 98% by moving their Windows workloads to AWS. AWS delivers double the performance and achieved a 62% reduction in costs in comparison with the next largest cloud provider for a SQL Server workload on an EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance, according to Principled Technologies.

#3 Superior security

AWS offers a staggering 230 security, compliance, and governance services and features, five times more than its closest cloud provider counterpart. AWS also provides encryption across over a hundred distinct AWS services. By leveraging these comprehensive security offerings, customers can effectively safeguard their environments. The AWS Nitro System in EC2 instances offloads virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software, effectively reducing the potential attack surface and ensuring minimal exposure to vulnerabilities.

#4 Cost optimization

By leveraging AWS for Windows workloads, customers benefit from accelerated growth, increased operational efficiency, and substantial long-term cost savings. According to IDC, customers can reduce their five-year cost of operations by 56% and achieve a 37% reduction in infrastructure costs. This translates to an impressive 442% return on investment (ROI) over a three-year period. Unique pricing models such as Savings Plans offer savings of up to 72% on Amazon EC2 instances, while Amazon EC2 Spot instances enable cost reductions of up to 90% for fault-tolerant workloads.

#5 Smooth migration

AWS has facilitated the seamless migration of millions of enterprises worldwide, including renowned names like Sysco, Hess, Sony DADC, Ancestry, and Expedia. With the time-tested AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) methodology and the extensive expertise offered by AWS partners, customers are able to evaluate, optimize, and seamlessly shift their Windows and SQL Server workloads to AWS with minimal downtime to applications.

#6 Flexible licensing

AWS provides the broadest range of choices in the cloud for utilizing both new and existing Microsoft software licenses. With the purchase of license-included instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), you receive fully compliant SQL Server licenses directly from AWS. You also have the flexibility to bring your existing licenses to AWS using options such as Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, or EC2 instances with default tenancy through Microsoft License Mobility via Software Assurance.

Ready to take the next step? Cloudar has unparalleled expertise in maximizing the potential of your Windows workloads on AWS. Get in touch to let us guide your way to higher performance and efficiency.

The post Unsurpassed: 6 reasons to run Microsoft Workloads on AWS appeared first on Cloudar.

One of the key take-aways, is to travel in good company. Good travelling buddies make you strong and resilient in order to overcome roadblocks. They make you persistent. I have had the joy and luck to travel in very good company the past few years.

Today is the day to stop at a Milestone and enjoy the scenery.

At Cloudar, we are glad to announce that we officially have achieved our AWS Migration Competency Delivery partnership.

With this competency, Cloudar has proven to be a reliable partner and expert for Customers to assist and guide them in their Digital Migration journey.

It will get its place besides all of the other AWS competencies we already achieved.

Look at it as climbing a mountain, you have to be well-prepared for it , and well-equipped. But it will still take quite some effort and make you sweat. But when you arrive at your goal, you will see the clear perspective of where you’re going to. New roads reveil.

Today, with this competency, and with strong support of AWS, we are ready to even help our customers even more with reaching their goals and become a trustworthy travel companion in their Digital Migration Journey.

Maybe the travel metaphor seems less relevant in these times of staycations, but it is the journey itself and your next target that counts. It doesn’t always need to be far, just enjoy the road and your next success.

So, I think we arrived at a conclusion : you now know that Cloudar is an AWS Migration delivery partner ready to roll, staycations can be quite enjoyable too, and I also believe we even have got the people, process, tooling triangle covered along the way…

Please allow me to say special thanks to the travel companions that made it happen : AWS & AWS Partner Migration team, Cloudar Teams and especially our Customers ! Thank you.

Please consult the Public Migration Customer cases on our website and reach out.

The post Great News : Cloudar is an official AWS Migration Competency Delivery Partner ! appeared first on Cloudar.

In IT we have learned to embrace change and new technology. We all need to change if we want our businesses to stay relevant, don’t we? But change, and certainly positive change, doesn’t always happen overnight. It is a process in which we will need to make decisions that will define the desired output.

Since systems, including people and organizations, are interconnected, we have to approach change holistically to make it happen. Therefore, processes exist to guide you during the transformation and help you to arrive at the desired state. In our digital transformation journey and in Cloud Migration it’s not different.

Our approach towards Cloud Migration is a tried and true, structured approach, in which we will first prepare ourselves, then acquire the right methodologies and tools to lay solid foundations and from there on, start practicing and building. During this execution phase, we will iteratively ‘Slice and Dice’ your workloads and business capabilities into reasonable and practical actionables, following an agile approach. Practice makes perfect and before you know it, you’re migrating at scale.

In this perspective, the setup of a highly efficient Migration Factory is utterly important. Here we will make use of the technology and tools at hand to facilitate and automate the migration as much as we can. You can for example make use of CloudEndure, which delivers flexible and innovative migration solutions. Cloudendure offers Continuous block-level replication, cross-infrastructure machine conversion, does automated orchestration and this with a minimal footprint.

Once you’re in the AWS cloud, possibilities to improve, optimize and reinvent are numerous.

Business capabilities will be transformed with available Cloud-Native Services and Technology.

Choosing a partner or MSP that guides you and will help you make the right decisions during the journey, is a direction that you should make as early in the process as possible. It’s an important decision, because once you started your Cloud journey, you will start to see opportunities in which a trusted advisor is a valuable resource to ensure you make the right choices.

Do you want to know where you are in your Cloud journey or where to get started ? Contact your partner for an AWS Migration Readiness Assessment or a AWS Well-Architected Review. It’s a small step, but an essential one to keep your business moving forward in a fast-pace world.

The post Slice and Dice your Cloud Migration and Keep Moving appeared first on Cloudar.