E-commerce website database migrated to Aurora with minimal downtime
E-commerce website database migrated to Aurora with minimal downtime
REGION
Middle-East
COMPANY TYPE
Small-Medium Business
INDUSTRY
Health & Beauty
CLOUD SOLUTION
THE CUSTOMER
Founded in Mecca in 1929, Ibraheem Al Qurashi (IAQ) Perfumes has grown from humble beginnings to one of the major perfume companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the Gulf. Reminiscent of the luxury perfume trade of bygone years, IAQ specialized in the sale of the amber, oud (a dark, scented resin—often called “liquid gold”—costing upwards of $5000/lb. and ubiquitous in the Middle East), and distinctive perfume blends unique to the company. Building on its reputation for evocative scents and quality products, IAQ soon opened its first showroom in Jeddah and now has a considerable brick-and-mortar presence across KSA, Kuwait, Oman, and the UAE.
Adapting to industry demands and market opportunities—and with the goal of establishing Ibraheem Al Qurashi as the brand name for oriental perfumes worldwide by 2025—the company launched its online presence. The eCommerce platform offers a comprehensive range of fragrances—incorporating Saudi products renowned for their quality and characterized by unique scents—to the global market.
THE CHALLENGE
Speed & Performance, in e-commerce, have a direct impact on business revenue.
Hence, these two factors should be essential metrics for all eCommerce merchants. From this perspective, the customer wanted to solve all the problems in his eCommerce website regarding reliability, performance, and latency. After deep investigations and discussions with the customer, the cause was eventually determined to be a Database Problem.
The customer was using MariaDB, and with business growth, this database engine became the main reason for low performance, frequent latency peak, replica lag, the need for many security patches, not to mention the increasing cost without any added value to the business.
With all previous problems and the tremendous effects on the business, the customer was even willing to increase the MariaDB to a considerable size of 12xlarge, which can’t be considered best practice. The customer had four databases, all running on the MariaDB engine with the same essential problems.
THE SOLUTION
During the first month of our engagement, the technical team, led by Hamzeh Shaghlil, AWS Solutions Lead, leveraged AWS well-architecture to assess Ibrahim Alqurashi’s environment. Based on five core pillars—reliability, security, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Starting from this approach, Bespin identified several quick wins that can be achieved using AWS DMS service to migrate customer databases from MariaDB RDS to Aurora cluster.
Based on Bespin’s evaluation, Aurora RDS was the most efficient engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.
Only AWS Services was used as a part of the solution like Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Data Migration Service (DMS), Key Management Service (KMS) , CloudWatch, and Route53
The first AWS service used was AWS Data Migration Service (DMS) to migrate from MariaDB to Aurora MySQL RDS with almost zero downtime. Bespin considered AWS Best practice to connect the source and target databases to an AWS DMS replication instance by configuring a network and connecting two AWS resources in the same virtual private cloud (VPC) as the replication instance.
The second AWS service used was Amazon Route 53 and its Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Local DNS Failover enables a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using Amazon Route 53, we managed the customer’s end-users to be routed to the application’s endpoints and quickly switch the application database connection from MariaDB to Aurora MySQL. The newly created Aurora RDS were encrypted by AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create and manage keys and control the use of encryption across AWS services to ensure security reliability and built-in auditing.
In reference to Bespin Global’s AWS Managed Services delivered to Ibrahim al-Qurashi, Bespin provided the flexibility to scale their services on-demand and benefit from the high availability of over 99.99% of these services, with 24/7 integrated support services, including applications and network monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.
Bespin’s Managed Services team is working directly with the consulting team to evaluate all metrics and logs that were collected from Ibrahim al-Qurashi infrastructure & applications to optimize the workload components on the levels of security, operational and cost by enabling AWS best practices.
Bespin’s Managed service team supports the customer with periodic recommendations based on the evaluation provided by data logs and metrics from the team that is using AWS native tools such as AWS Compute Optimizer & Cloudwatch.
Also, we used AWS CloudWatch to monitor the RDS and application performance. CloudWatch provides many out-of-the-box dashboards to observe the health and usage of customer cloud deployments like CPU usage, disk read/write, Network in/out, etc.
Architecture Diagram
RESULTS & BENEFITS
Stability, Performance, Cost Optimization.
Bespin stabilized and optimized Ibrahim Alqurashi environment by performing migration to the Aurora cluster and applying best practices on all clusters due to Aurora’s High Throughput with Low Jitter, Push-button Compute Scaling, and Storage Auto-scaling with its low-latency read replicas across three Availability Zones (AZs) which can be considered a major feature for customer business need.
In addition, Bespin has also applied all tunning and enhancement on the database level after migration. That included tunning and configuring parameters group on each database, reviewing all application’s queries, build required index, and analyze tables.
After all previous actions, the RDS load decreased, and performance was a boost. Due to these enhancements, we were able to reduce database size from 12xlarge to only a large extent, which saved a lot of cost for the customer with more reliable, stables, and efficient performance for both RDS and eCommerce websites.
About Bespin Global, an e& enterprise company:
An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.
In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.
Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.
Email: info@bespinglobal.ae
Address: The Offices 4, #138-139, One Central, Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC)
Telephone: 800 BESPIN (237746)
P.O. Box: 340729
