Welcome » Case Studies » Coop – E-commerce Website Infrastructure
AWS CASE STUDY
COOP:
E-COMMERCE WEBSITE INFRASTRUCTURE
Coop has both physical supermarkets and a webshop. Unsatisfied with their previous solution, they needed a more cost-effective, stable and reliable platform to run their e-commerce and backoffice on.
CUSTOMER:
Coop
PROJECT:
FIRST LAUNCH:
January, 2020
Customer Profile
Coop Supermarkets is a result-oriented, independent cooperative which provides delicious food to consumers and members entrepreneurs. Coop is affiliated to Superunie, a procurement organisation for thirteen supermarket organisations with a market share of 29.2 percent. Coop’s physical distribution is carried out via two national centres: one for shelf-stable articles and one for fresh products.
The Challenge
Alignment
Align and plan with multiple external and internal IT service providers for a smooth transition.
Migration
It was required to migrate as soon as possible, with as little downtime or interruptions as possible, in a less than 8 hours window.
Database Size
Transfer the database from a locked down on-premises server to S3 in a timely fashion, without limiting bandwidth for the existing application.
“We were impressed with the improved performance and stability of the Amazon infrastructure and the knowledge and cooperation of the different team members”– MARCO VAN DER ZALM – IT DIRECTOR
Our Solution
We’ve migrated the on-premises Oracle back-end databases to Amazon RDS for Oracle using the import from S3 method. After testing, this turned out to give us the shortest time window needed for migrating.
Before, Coop was also using an on-premises FTP server, both for incoming data from SAP systems, as for outgoing data towards branch offices. By moving this flow to AWS Transfer for SFTP and integrating it with the EC2 instances which run the e-commerce software, the management overhead was reduced significantly. Route 53 outbound resolvers were used for the e-commerce software to resolve the addresses of the on-premises SAP systems. Coop uses Intershop as their e-commerce platform. The solution provides a redundant setup for the web, app and Solr servers. With AWS, Coop has the opportunity to scale in and out as required.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk managed Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group, spread across 2 Availability Zones for scalability and maximum fault tolerance.
- AWS Transfer for SFTP to transfer files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using SFTP
- Amazon ELB to balance traffic across the instances.
- Amazon RDS Backend, spread across multiple availability zones for high-availability.
- Amazon S3 object storage for static files.
- Amazon CloudFront for edge caching, to reduce overall load on the system by caching where appropriate.
- AWS CloudTrail to monitor the IAM actions taking place on the account.
We also made use of a number of AWS technical partner solutions:
- CloudCheckr© was used to ensure the setup complied with AWS best practices and to ensure ongoing compliance once the solution was in production.
- This infrastructure was managed using AWS CloudFormation, both code and infrastructure were deployed on AWS using Jenkins Pipelines making use of CloudBees© Jenkins plugins.
- Site24x7© was used in conjunction with AWS CloudWatch to ensure optimal performance across all environments.
The Result
The implementation of the e-commerce application on AWS has proven a significant performance improvement. At the same time this improved application infrastructure environment resulted in a considerable cost saving.
The architecture is set up according to the Well Architected Framework, resulting in an optimal and compatible setup for Managed Services support under the best circumstances. A pro-active approach and 24/7 support offered by Cloudar as the MSP Parter will result in less downtime of the application. This way the Coop IT Team will be able to focus on the application and business support. Coop also benefits from cost savings by stopping test and acceptance environments outside of office hours.
