Case Study | Mobile App Migration to AWS
Architecting an AWS Cloud Environment for a Retail Client to Enable Mobile Application Reliability & Scalability
Published: 11 March 2022
Business Challenge
Pick ‘n Pay identified the need to move an existing application (Pick ’n Pay ASAP!) into a scalable and reliable hosting environment to meet usage demands for the festive season, starting with Black Friday in November 2021. Pick ‘n Pay – asap! is a tightly coupled online platform consisting of multiple backends and front ends. It spans multiple technologies, collectively, these technologies form a powerful solution for online grocery shopping and delivery.
AWS was chosen as their preferred cloud provider, against extreme deadlines and many obstacles, dedicated engineering saw Tangent Solutions deliver the project within a month of initiation.
It was expected that traffic and utilisation of the platform would vary hugely from day to day, and between sale seasons, with a large gap between troughs and peaks. This type of volatility could lead to oversizing and inefficient capacity planning with an on-premise hosting strategy. Along with inefficient hardware allocation to power the application, this type of hosting could mean insufficient capacity should traffic on the app spike and more processing storage be required.
At the time, Black Friday and the festive shopping season was only a month away, remediation along these pillars, as well as implementation of complex upgrades, needed to be completed effectively and efficiently by a seasoned cloud partner.
The Solution
The solution is best described by the approach. A thorough assessment of the legacy environment produced a detailed plan of action for the cloud migration, ensuring efficient delivery that transitioned into the testing and handover phases.
AWS DMS, CloudEndure, and DBForge were the migration tools of choice, allowing us to run multiple migration strategies in parallel. Moreover, it ensured uncorrupted and reliable data at the destination end of the migration.
Detailed contingency planning, going as far as a ‘plan E’, was considered necessary with this high stake project. Our careful planning ensured the final migration, along with the cutover into the new environment, was successful, and contingencies were not required.
Tangent provided a solution to Pick ‘n Pay comprising of the following AWS resources:
- RDS
- EC2
- ELB
- VPC
- CloudWatch
- DMS
Why AWS?
As a fairly new application, asap! usage was expected to surge quickly as marketing efforts enticed new users. The existing hosting environment limited the ability to quickly scale infrastructure and also hindered the ability to release into staged environments, while mitigating risk, as quickly as needed.
A cloud solution would give asap! the ability to spin up and tear down resources as needed, allowing Pick ’n Pay to benefit from a ‘pay-as-you-use’ solution. The AWS ecosystem would give them the flexibility they needed to meet their immediate business goals and facilitate future improvements as well as planned features in asap!.
Why Pick ‘n Pay chose Tangent?
Pick ’n Pay set a seemingly unachievable goal for full migration of asap! into the AWS Cloud, before Black Friday 2021.
With Tangent’s proven record of quality delivery in high-stress environments, and our ability to deliver well architected solutions under tight deadlines, we were the perfect choice of partner for Pick ’n Pay.
Tangent Cloud X AWS delivered the project on time with careful planning and our experienced resources supported by the tools needed to work with data accurately and securely between different hosting environments. Tangent exceeded Pick ’n Pay’s expectations and delivered a quality solution that met all their needs
Results and Benefits
Tangent Solutions migrated asap! within the very ambitious timeframes, taking care of the hosting and infrastructure management. This allows Pick ‘n Pay developers to focus on much needed application feature updates and refinements.
Asap! was live by Black Friday 2021, bringing with it record-breaking sales for Pick ’n Pay. The app’s success continued into December, with sales numbers exceeding Black Friday’s records.
In addition to Pick ’n Pay’s increased revenue, the augmented performance of the app delivered better user experiences. This resulted in fewer support tickets and an unusually quiet December period for Pick ’n Pay’s IT Team. Tangent was responsible for one of the most peaceful Christmas seasons in terms of support, they’d ever had. The application successfully scaled and healed with little-to-no technical intervention.
Next Steps
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