Implementation and maintenance of cloud infrastructure in AWS for Displate
Implementation and care of cloud infrastructure in AWS and DevOps support, provided by Hostersi team, allowed one of the greatest Polish startups with global scale - Displate - to expand even more effectively into new markets, as well as provide seamless and uninterrupted service to customers from all over the world. See the backstage of our implementation and cooperation with Displate!
Introduction
Displate is a Polish startup with global reach, selling metal posters dedicated to fans of movies, series, music, computer games. Or simply for people who want to have something original on their wall. Displate products have a constantly and rapidly growing group of fans, mainly abroad. 99.6% of their sales is exported, of which 80% goes to six markets: USA, Great Britain, France, Canada, Germany and Australia. An important part of Displate's business is the cooperation with game producers (e.g. Blizzard, CD Projekt RED or Rovio) and selling products under licenses of such popular brands as Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel or NASA. To date, the company has sold over four million of its products.
Business challenges
The growing number of customers and expansion into new markets, necessitated the development of applications, and thus the expansion of the existing cloud infrastructure. As a result, the infrastructure in question required increasing involvement of specialists, whose task was to maintain, monitor and take care of its proper functioning. For Internet business (for which it is necessary to operate non-stop) it was a huge challenge, because it was necessary to ensure smooth and uninterrupted operation of the environment at all times.
Solution
In response to the requirements set by the client: security, high SLA and application availability 24/7, we offered our services in the form of administrative support. This means a guarantee of solving the problem with the response time specified in the contract. In addition, having extensive experience in building IT infrastructures for ecommerce customers, we proposed several changes related to the management itself and additional DevOps services to increase the efficiency of processes and the quality of created solutions.
Implementation and maintenance of cloud infrastructure in AWS
One of the first actions undertaken for Displate was to prepare the migration of services to their counterparts in Amazon Web Services. Within the framework of the provided remote administration service, we conduct a systematic development of the Customer's servers. During our cooperation the infrastructure grew from 2 to 54 servers. In cooperation with the Displate programmers, several solutions were implemented that increased the efficiency of deployment of new versions of the application. These include the separation of application layers (decoupling), separation of development and production environments by introducing DEV and UAT environments, or automation of application publishing based on AWS CodeDeploy and Bitbucket Pipelines. In order to achieve high HA, we applied horizontal scaling through an autoscaling group, whose task is to monitor the application and automatically respond to increasing or decreasing requirements. Taking into account the global nature of Displate's ecommerce business and the customer's importance to the speed of loading their applications, we have also implemented a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to make static content load faster for end users while increasing the security of applications against DDoS attacks. Security is another area where we supported Displate by implementing the server access restriction and backup policies.
Technologies
- AWS CodeDeploy - automated application deployment management
- Bitbucket Pipelines - enables automated building, testing, and even deployment of code based on a configuration file in the repository
- AWS Auto Scaling - horizontal scaling to achieve high HA
- Amazon S3 - static files
- AWS Lambda - automation of resource allocation
- Cloudflare (rate limiting) - protection against brute-force and other attacks targeting the application layer
Business benefits
Thanks to the cooperation with Hostersi, Displate can now guarantee its security and business continuity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Thanks to the implemented deployment tools, the process of publishing the new version of the application is now much faster and more secure. The efficiency of infrastructure management processes has also increased, and one of its tangible effects is the readiness of the environment for a sudden surge in user traffic during seasonal sales like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
"Our cooperation with Hostersi has always been on the right track thanks to their credibility and reliability. Their solution helps us a lot in minimizing the risks, thus our platform can work uninterruptedly 24/7. We can always count on their experienced and rapid reaction, so it’s utterly natural we can recommend a whole team of these happy professionals. Big up!"
44-200 Rybnik
Poland
REGON: 240692928
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