Founded in 2012, Violet Grey is an online marketplace for beauty products. With readers from 170 countries and a luxury online store brimming with curated beauty products, it has become a trusted destination for beauty enthusiasts worldwide. To fuel its rapid growth, Violet Grey embarked on a transformational journey to boost productivity, fortify security and compliance, and achieve unmatched scalability.
This is the story of how nClouds, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, collaborated with Violet Grey to revamp the beauty retailer’s AWS infrastructure, unleashing a new era of efficiency, protection, and growth.
The Challenge: Improving Productivity, Security, and Scalability
Violet Grey’s success hinges on its online presence, making its AWS-hosted website critical to its ecommerce operations. However, Violet Grey’s engineers were burdened with time-consuming DevOps tasks, hampering productivity.
Violet Grey also aimed to enhance scalability to meet escalating demands and prepare for a PCI assessment to ensure compliance with PCI DSS.
Why AWS and nClouds: A Perfect Partnership
Recognizing the need for expert guidance, Violet Grey turned to nClouds, renowned for its expertise in DevOps, containers, migration, and security. After in-depth discussions and analysis, Violet Grey embraced nClouds’ recommendations, harnessing the power of AWS and nClouds’ best practices to transform its infrastructure.
The Solution: Enhancing Efficiency, Protection, and Performance
With nClouds’ Solution Architecture, Violet Grey embarked on a journey of optimization and fortification. It migrated its content delivery network (CDN) from Instart Logic to Amazon CloudFront, unlocking cost savings, reducing latency, and amplifying website performance. CloudFront seamlessly collaborated with Amazon S3 to serve and safeguard its content.
To streamline the infrastructure, nClouds leveraged CloudFormation for automated resource creation and consolidated Violet Grey’s microservices onto a single Amazon ECS platform. This architectural transformation yielded significant time savings for its engineers, allowing them to focus on innovation.
Violet Grey’s infrastructure was further fortified with an Amazon VPC spanning three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) to enhance availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. AWS Auto Scaling dynamically adjusted capacity between public and private subnets, ensuring steady performance at an optimized cost. Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis delivered the speed and efficiency needed for its applications. Content-based routing was seamlessly facilitated by AWS ALB, connecting public and private subnets.
In preparation for its PCI assessment, nClouds deployed Alert Logic WAF as a service on CloudFront, providing comprehensive protection against potential threats. Robust security groups within the Amazon VPC acted as virtual firewalls, and IAM roles ensured precise access control. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and AWS Secrets Manager fortified security by safeguarding sensitive data.
The Results: A Transformed Ecommerce Beauty Business
Violet Grey’s collaboration with nClouds enabled it to thrive in the highly competitive beauty industry. The project delivered an array of benefits, including the following:
- Improved DevOps productivity: By streamlining infrastructure and automating resource creation, Violet Grey’s engineers gained more time for innovation and value-added tasks.
- Enhanced security and PCI compliance: Violet Grey’s strengthened security measures and PCI assessment readiness positioned it as a trusted guardian of its customers’ data.
- Superior scalability for ecommerce: With a robust AWS infrastructure and optimized CloudFront-S3 collaboration, Violet Grey’s ecommerce platform could effortlessly scale to meet growing demands.
Through its partnership with nClouds, Violet Grey achieved remarkable results in productivity, security, and scalability. Streamlined infrastructure and automated resource creation increased DevOps productivity, while enhanced security measures prepared it for PCI compliance. With a robust AWS infrastructure and optimized CloudFront-S3 collaboration, Violet Grey achieved superior scalability for its ecommerce business.
For more information, read the full case study here.
