Implementing a new containerised, cloud-native infrastructure

Giving the Beauty Pie’s eCommerce platform a facelift with HCL Commerce

The Client: Beauty Pie

Beauty Pie is an innovative subscription-based beauty products company that emerged as a dynamic player in the eCommerce beauty market. Since their inception in 2015, they have been committed to delivering high-quality beauty products through a unique subscription model that challenges traditional retail approaches.

They required a modern, scalable e-commerce platform to support their growing business.

Project Overview

  • Client had an existing eCommerce platform on a monolithic infrastructure being discontinued
  • Clent wanted to migrate to a new eCommerce provider on a containerised environment
  • DeeperThanBlue delivered a cloud-native HCL Commerce solution on Google Cloud Platform with 99.9% uptime

The Problem

Since they entered the market, Beauty Pie had based their online store on IBM Commerce on Cloud, a monolithic application running on IBM WebSphere Application Server on virtualised servers in IBM’s Data Centre. However, IBM Commerce was being discontinued, meaning that Beauty Pie needed to migrate to an alternative eCommerce platform.

They also wanted to take the opportunity to move away from their monolithic application to a more flexible, scalable solution that could handle peak traffic during promotions and seasonal sales as well as meet the needs of an ambitious business model. Moreover, the eCommerce industry as a whole was shifting towards containerisation and Kubernetes deployments, so Beauty Pie needed to follow suit if they were to remain competitive.

The Objectives

  • Migrate to HCL Commerce V9
  • Implement a containerised, cloud-native infrastructure
  • Ensure high availability and performance
  • Maintain cost-efficiency
  • Enable seamless scaling for traffic spikes

The Solution

DeeperThanBlue crafted a comprehensive cloud migration strategy that transformed Beauty Pie’s technological infrastructure. The HCL Commerce platform was selected as it was HCL that acquired IBM WebSphere Commerce, so Beauty Pie had confidence in the technology. By selecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we leveraged a robust and flexible environment that could meet the client’s complex requirements. The solution centred on Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which allowed for unprecedented scalability and resilience.

The infrastructure was meticulously designed by DeeperThanBlue Cloud architects, and using Terraform which provides the Infrastructure as Code (IaC), enabled a repeatable and reliable deployment process across production and non-production environments (development, quality assurance, pre-production) differentiated through namespaces. Strategic placement of Kubernetes nodes across multiple zones within the Europe West region ensured high availability and minimised potential points of failure. Helm charts were employed for application deployment, while Vault managed secrets securely.

The ability to seamlessly handle traffic spikes, reduce operational overhead, and maintain a flexible technological infrastructure represents a significant competitive advantage.

The Solution (continued)

A particular challenge was the legacy IBM DB2 database part of the HCL Commerce software stack, which was incompatible with cloud-native databases. To address this, the team hosted the database in a virtual machine and implemented a sophisticated disaster recovery strategy through database replication, creating a standby instance to mitigate potential single points of failure.

The DevOps pipeline, built using Jenkins and hosted on GCP, automated the container creation process. Any code or configuration changes in Git would trigger automatic container builds, which were then pushed to DockerHub, with Slack notifications keeping the team informed of build completions.

Monitoring and performance tracking were equally sophisticated. New Relic continued to provide Application Performance Monitoring (APM), while Google Cloud Logging offered seamless issue diagnosis. Kubernetes cronjobs were utilised for critical tasks like data loads and extracts, further enhancing the system’s operational efficiency.

This cloud-native approach allowed Beauty Pie to achieve cost efficiency in day-to-day operations while seamlessly scaling resources for peak traffic events like new product and range launches, promotions and seasonal sales, avoiding potential bottlenecks experienced in traditional monolithic infrastructure.

As part of a Cloud Managed Application Service and Support Desk we continuously monitored costs through comprehensive reports and alerts to prevent unforeseen expenses. Additionally, we ensured sufficient capacity within the environment to accommodate pod restarts without triggering unnecessary scaling up.

The result was a highly resilient system achieving 99.9% uptime with predictable and controllable operational costs.

Final Thoughts

For e-commerce businesses navigating the complex landscape of digital transformation, the Beauty Pie case study demonstrates the transformative potential of cloud-native architectures. By embracing containerisation, businesses can achieve unprecedented levels of scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency. The ability to seamlessly handle traffic spikes, reduce operational overhead, and maintain a flexible technological infrastructure represents a significant competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced digital marketplace.