AllSaints boosts online sales with move to Google Cloud
Global fashion retailer AllSaints has seen a huge amount of its worldwide success due to strong online sales. With over two million site visits per month, one of the retailer’s most important challenges is delivering a smooth online experience for its customers.
As the company’s Executive Consultant Digital and Technology John Bovill points out, predicting sales during times of peak demand is hard, especially online: “Our need for infrastructure often doubles at those times, but we only actually need those servers for a very short period, such as Cyber Weekend.”
To meet the challenge of peak demand, AllSaints runs over 60 servers. However, while this is more than sufficient to meet busy times, outside of those peaks, almost half of these are idle, rendering the solution less than cost-effective. On top of this, adding additional capacity proved an extremely slow process that hindered other areas of the business.
To overcome this problem, AllSaints decided it needed to migrate to a cloud infrastructure, John Bovill said: “Responsive websites and fast page-load speeds are critical for the mobile, connected customer. We keep things fast by using Google Cloud to provision capacity instantaneously, whenever it’s needed, to keep customers happy and sales up.”
After experimenting with several different systems, AllSaints settled on Kubernetes, using a mixed environment of Google Cloud and another provider. However, after realising the cost reduction and enhanced scalability offered by Google Cloud, the company made the strategic decision to build new apps and services exclusively in Google Cloud.
The company decided to migrate in one go, to avoid network latency between cross-service communications. The infrastructure team set up all the technology types needed: Cloud SQL via MySQL on Compute Engine, hosts for Kubernetes, and Cloud Memorystore. They then tested the build process before signing off on the migration.
Since migrating, AllSaints has cut its infrastructure costs by 50 per cent and improved page load times 32 per cent, while the smoother site experience has led to the company’s conversion rate improving by over 17 per cent.
