Beauty Pie is making lots of noise in the beauty industry. The first of its kind, the luxury beauty buyers’ club is challenging mainstream luxury brands. Its members have access to luxury products from the world’s leading beauty laboratories, but at affordable prices.
Beauty Pie’s mission is to bring their members the world’s best luxury beauty products, and to make them available at a totally transparent factory cost; all the make-up without the markup.
DeeperThanBlue has worked with Beauty Pie since the launch of the business, and we’ve had the immense pleasure of watching the brand innovate and grow over the years. We initially developed an eCommerce solution with people, processes and technology at its core, utilising IBM WebSphere Commerce on Cloud.
After a seamless migration to Google Cloud Platform, Beauty Pie now has a powerful estate that has seen a huge improvement in performance since their eCommerce platform move to HCL Commerce version 9.
Weighing up options
When IBM sold Commerce on Cloud to HCL, Beauty Pie initially moved from WebSphere version 8 to HCL Commerce version 8 for their eCommerce platform. They were then required to move their cloud hosting completely from IBM’s servers within an eight month time period.
The challenge for DeeperThanBlue was to ensure a scalable and secure solution for Beauty Pie’s eCommerce website and cloud hosting. The key decisions in ensuring the success of the project were deciding whether to re-platform entirely or move over to version 9 of HCL Commerce, as well as choosing a cloud or on-premise host.
DeeperThanBlue developed an appropriate solution that catered to Beauty Pie’s need for agility, flexibility and scalability in line with the business’ cloud-first approach.
The project
The decision was taken to move to version 9 of HCL Commerce, as opposed to a complete re-platform. Version 9 provides the ability to increase capacity at the flick of a switch, offering the essential scalability that Beauty Pie needs.
After initially moving their v8 platform to DeeperThanBlue’s on-premise hosting, the question was whether to remain on-premise or make the switch to cloud hosting. As Beauty Pie has always been dedicated to being fully on-cloud, it made sense to move in this direction.
The decision to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the host was largely due to its ongoing partnership with HCL, the richness of the Kubernetes customisation model and the cost-effectiveness of the solution.
Containerisation, implemented with Kubernetes, made complete sense; once containers split applications from one another they are easy to maintain, update and move. Downtime is also eliminated with the whole process becoming much easier and smoother. Both Kubernetes and GCP are also self-healing, meaning outages are far less likely.
DeeperThanBlue also introduced some elements of High Availability Disaster Recovery tactics. Two copies of Beauty Pie’s database are now housed in separate locations to ensure complete security and safety. The project was also approached from a ‘zero-trust’ point of view, giving all nodes a hardened layer of security, so that if the system gets compromised the servers aren’t accessible.
Now on Google Cloud Platform, Beauty Pie has a powerful estate that has seen a huge improvement in performance since the move to HCL v9.
Are you considering a migration to the cloud? Want to know more about HCL Commerce version 9? Get in touch with our experts below.