"COMMENCIS not only built a robust architecture solution that decreased our latency significantly but also enabled us to manage the sudden peak of traffic during campaign periods successfully thanks to their auto-scale mechanism. They performed the implementation that was smoothly delivered in a very short time.." Gökhan Uygun - Director of IT at FLO
About FLO Retailing
FLO the largest footwear retailer in Turkey, realizes the production of more than 3 million 500 thousand pairs of shoes and the sales of 35 million pairs of shoes per year.
The company exports to Pakistan, Macedonia, Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan and Bulgaria with the shoe brands within its organization, produces 120 thousand pairs of soles daily at the sole factory it owns and exports to many countries such as France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco as well as meeting the demand of the Turkish market.
Continuing its growth in line with its goal to become one of the top 10 global brands that will emerge from Turkey in 2023, Flo Retailing serves almost 400 stores domestically through the FLO and Sport in Street retail channels. Furthermore, Flo Retailing offers its services in almost 50 FLO stores abroad. FLO Retailing offers employment opportunities to more than 7 thousand individuals directly and almost 30,000 indirectly.
The Challenge
FLO was using on-premise hosting solution; However, they found that they lacked the manpower to keep up with necessary tasks, such as scaling both computing and database systems, provisioning, setting up new servers, providing high availability to apps, and disaster recovery.
FLO needed to avoid a large up-front investment and wanted a solution that would help handle the workload of the newly launched campaigns. The solution was migrating the current solution to a contemporary cloud solution using scalable, highly available and flexible services.
Output
FLO utilizes the great computing capabilities of AWS by using its Application Load Balancer and auto-scaling services. Of course, computing is not the only product of FLO’s architecture. They also use the well-managed RDS service -Aurora- to handle relational database workloads. Thanks to Aurora’s custom implementation of MySQL, FLO’s database latency has decreased significantly after switching to RDS. Also, they are not concerned about the disk space left for the database anymore, since Aurora scales the disk space by itself.
Flo’s architecture contains a managed Elasticsearch cluster to minimize the duration of product search in their applications. In addition, the application logs are analyzed and transferred through the Elasticsearch service.
FLO uses the ElastiCache service to store their applications’ session data. Of course, it is critical to store this data outside from the application servers to form a stateless web application.
CloudWatch is used to monitor all resources in the FLO environment, which are used to track and analyze the metrics of the system. In case of an emergency, related teams receive email, notifications and even calls, thanks to a 3rd party application -PagerDuty- that works smoothly with a SNS to make calls.
Of course, security is a critical concern for a company like FLO, one of the top 5 e-commerce websites in Turkey. They use WAF and its Web ACLs to secure their web applications, preventing any attacks such as SQL Injection or XSS (Cross Site Scripting). They also collect all the API logs with Kinesis Firehose streaming service and then store this data in S3 and analyze them with great analytics service of AWS, Athena. Before analyzing the API logs, the data is transformed within the Glue service, another great Big Data service of AWS. All extracting, transforming, loading and analyzing of operations are done serverlessly, with the help of the AWS Analytics services, which requires almost zero expertise about these processes.
The Benefits
Since FLO began using Amazon Web Services, latency has decreased significantly compared to an old solution that they were using, by the help of their new robust architecture. Other than the decrease in latency, thanks to their auto-scale mechanism, FLO hasn’t faced any critical downtime due to sudden peak of the traffic during newly launched campaigns. Now, they successfully scale their services, have low latency, highly available web applications and more importantly, make hundreds of thousands of customers happy.