Watchmaker handles high order volume with AWS
Founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Filip Tysander, Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington produces and sells accessories inspired by classic minimalist designs. It has grown from a small startup to a $200 million business through its elegant, affordable products, bolstering its brand through clever social media strategies.
Daniel Wellington’s rapid growth came with challenges for the company. Head of Global IT Operations Lezgin Bakircioglu says: “Our revenue was growing fivefold in the early years, and we’re still doubling, year over year. As such, we have high demands to be able to sell watches to our customers, and decisions can change day-by-day. We need to be flexible, responsive, and agile.”
Having previously utilised a single server for its infrastructure, Daniel Wellington opted to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to meet its demands. It began running its store through an architecture of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) back end and Magento e-commerce software.
This helped the company deal with the challenges of rapidly increasing traffic, while enabling it to start planning for the future. Bakircioglu adds that “we wanted to start using streams where multiple systems listen to messages rather than building point-to-point integrations between components. This would give us better insight to the system and the flows.”Daniel Wellington began looking into how it could migrate to a platform based on microservices, with individual service that would be independently maintainable, upgradable and scalable.
When the new platform was poised to rollout, Bakircioglu said: “We see the new platform being more efficient and agile compared to the old one, because we’ll only run compute capacity when there is an event, rather than having computer capacity idle and paying for the full capacity even if it’s not used.”
“However, scalability and predictability are the main reasons we’re going for this. When order volumes are high, AWS will take care of each sales event and automatically scale up. We get a predictable and stable platform regardless of the volumes.”
Commenting on working with AWS Enterprise Support, Bakircioglu said the service had been “first class”.
