Tuning up the Andertons Music eCommerce site with HCL Commerce
Andertons Music Co was founded in 1964, set up as a place where professional musicians could find the gear they needed. Over the years, Andertons evolved into a globally recognised brand with a sophisticated eCommerce site which has grown from an on-premise internally written eCommerce application. They are now a progressive e-commerce business that has consistently sought to leverage cutting-edge technology to enhance their online retail experience. Their commitment to technological innovation has been a defining characteristic of their digital strategy since migrating from an on-premise application to cloud-based infrastructure.
Project overview
- The client had an existing IBM Commerce on Cloud monolithic eCommerce application which was due to be discontinued.
- The client wanted to migrate to an alternative eCommerce platform running on a containerised infrastructure.
- DeeperThanBlue developed a Kubernetes-based cloud-native solution on Google Cloud Platform with 99.9% uptime.
The Problem
The eCommerce platform that Andertons had in place was based on IBM WebSphere Commerce on Cloud, a monolithic application running on traditional IBM WebSphere Application Server virtualised servers. As well as finding this increasingly restrictive and unable to meet the dynamic demands of modern e-commerce, the platform’s impending discontinuation provided the impetus for Andertons to investigate alternative solutions allowing them to implement a modern, containerised architecture and introduce headless website architecture that could provide greater flexibility and performance for their eCommerce site.
The Objectives
- Upgrade to HCL Commerce V9
- Implement a containerised, cloud-native infrastructure
- Ensure high availability and performance
- Maintain cost-efficiency
- Enable seamless scaling for peak traffic periods
The Solution
DeeperThanBlue orchestrated a sophisticated migration strategy for Andertons, selecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the foundation for their new technological ecosystem. The solution was built around Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which provided the scalability and resilience required for a modern eCommerce platform.
Terraform was employed to create a reliable, repeatable infrastructure deployment process. Separate clusters were established for production and non-production (development, quality assurance and pre-production) environments, using different namespaces to differentiate between the environments. Furthermore, Kubernetes nodes were strategically distributed across multiple zones in the Europe West region to ensure robust redundancy in case of a failure of a zones’ underlying servers or data centres, and to minimise potential service interruptions.
The implementation of a ‘headless’ website architecture was a notable innovation, utilising React for the front-end, SpringBoot as the middleware, and GraphQL to facilitate seamless backend connectivity. Helm charts managed application deployments, while Vault handled secure secret management.
The Solution (continued)
A significant technical constraint was the requirement to use IBM DB2 as the database, which prevented the adoption of cloud-native database solutions. To mitigate this limitation, the database was hosted in a virtual machine, with a comprehensive disaster recovery infrastructure implemented through primary-to-standby database replication.
The DevOps pipeline, constructed 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 providing real-time build status updates. Moving from a monolith to a cloud native platform with a reliable DevOps pipeline allows the development teams changes and new features to be deployed and tested within hours rather than days and weeks.
Performance monitoring and alerting remained a critical consideration. New Relic continued to provide Application Performance Monitoring, leveraging the team’s existing expertise. Google Cloud Logging was simultaneously utilised for immediate and comprehensive issue diagnosis.
Cloud cost management is crucial, as expenses can escalate unexpectedly. While cost calculators provide estimates, actual costs, like network ingress fees, often become clear only in production. Enabling cost reports and alerts helps monitor and control expenses.
Another consideration when defining the infrastructure is allowing sufficient capacity such that headroom is allowed for pods to be restarted without the environment having to scale up to facilitate this.
Using GKE the way we did enabled us to keep costs low for the day-to-day running of the website but also to scale up the environment for weekend promotions or Black Friday/Cyber Monday type events when the site could have been easily overwhelmed with traffic in a traditional monolithic infrastructure running on virtualised servers.
Final Thoughts
The Andertons case study exemplifies the transformative potential of cloud-native architectures in eCommerce. By embracing containerisation and modern deployment strategies, businesses can achieve remarkable improvements in system reliability, cost management, and operational flexibility. The ability to effortlessly scale during high-traffic events, maintain predictable operational costs, and rapidly adapt to technological changes represents a significant strategic advantage in the competitive digital marketplace.