Online fashion retailer drives digital offering with Azure
ASOS is a global online fashion retailer headquartered in London. In 2016, ASOS decided to migrate to a Microsoft Azure-powered microservices architecture, as it sought better scalability, quicker innovation and the capacity to rapidly incorporate new models of customer engagement.
This also involved ASOS choosing Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to drive a more personalised, intuitive shopping experience while streamlining order updates to ensure it met demand on the busiest shopping days.
Bob Strudwick, ASOS’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “We chose Azure Cosmos DB because of its global distribution and ability to handle heavy seasonal bursts like Black Friday. We can distribute our data models to be near the microservices they’re serving—wherever that is in the world.”
When it migrated to Azure, ASOS offered around 85,000 items and added around 5,000 new items per week, serving 15.4 million customers. Azure Cosmos DB helped enable it to create a real-time recommendations platform, allowing it to store and retrieve precalculated user profiles and product machine learning models to generate recommendations.
The platform is split into an offline recommendations engine and an online recommendations service, with machine learning models used to calculate, in real-time, the relevancy of a product to a particular customer, as well as the likelihood of them viewing, saving, adding to cart and buying the product.
The computation and personalisation decision engine is hosted on Azure Service Fabric, while the precomputed user profile and product vector data is stored in Azure Cosmos DB to ensure low-latency, millisecond random access reads.
Azure Cosmos DB has also helped ASOS process vast quantities of orders on peak days like Black Friday, with 167 million ASOS customer requests dealt with by Azure across 24 hours on Black Friday 2016. That’s 3,500 requests and 33 orders per second at an average response time of 48 milliseconds.
With Azure Cosmos DB, ASOS also built an easy-to-use online returns system. Customers can, with a few steps, request a return, download their return label, and get refunded.
