building a scalable and high-performance eCommerce platform primed for every possibility
jarir bookstore
building a scalable and high-performance eCommerce platform primed for every possibility
jarir bookstore
region
KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA
COMPANY Type
Private Company
industry
Retail
no.of employees
1,001 – 5,000
website
Region
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Company Type
Private Company
Industry
Retail
No. of Employees
1,001 – 5,000
Website
About Jarir
Ranked amongst Forbes Middle East’s Top 100 Companies – 2020 and Brand Finance’s Saudi Arabia 50 – 2022, Jarir Bookstore is the GCC’s market leader for books, electronics, consumer IT products, and office & school supplies. Established in 1979 on Jarir Street, Riyadh, the company has transformed itself a small store selling used books and art to expats into a Multi-National Public Cooperation boasting 60 bookstores across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE.
The Challenge
“Launching our Magento e-commerce platform out of another AWS Premier Partner’s managed colocation facilities in the UK, bought us a lot of limitations. As a typical on-premise environment, we experienced a lot of downtime issues, where we would sometimes be offline for as long as three days because of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks or infrastructure instability. A particular instance that sticks out was when we were down for five hours at the beginning of an Apple iPhone pre-order campaign. This not only cost us millions of dollars, but our brand image and online customer confidence had suffered tremendously.”
-Mohammed Alzughaibi, eCommerce Technology Manager at Jarir Bookstore
As a organization with aggressive plans for growth, this was not a sustainable model, and so Jarir decided to move to the AWS public cloud and levrage its extensive ecosystem capabilities. Having an in-depth knowledge of the AWS environment, the incumbent vendor was awarded the migration contract in July 2019. But project delays, downtime, performance and scalability issues, and unjustifiably high billing caused Jarir to revisit their partner strategy early in 2020.
“Because of the issues we were experiencing, we needed a partner located in the same time zone and working the same days (Sunday to Thursday) as we were,” says Mohammed. “Since we couldn’t find a local player with the caliber of world-class services we required, we reached out to AWS. They recommended Bespin MEA because of their regional presence and comprehensive skill set across multiple cloud providers, including AWS.”
The Solution
Starting off Bespin experts first assessed Jarir Bookstores’ current eCommerce environment by leveraging AWS Well-Architected Framework. Comprised of five core pillars i.e. reliability, security, performance, efficiency, and cost optimization, AWS Well-Architected provides a sustainable approach for the evaluation and development of resilient, secure, and efficient high-performing infrastructures for applications & workloads.
Following the assessment Bespin identified several quick wins such as optimizing web servers’ auto-scaling. This was followed by the focus on specific areas of the AWS environment aimed at increasing stability, scalability, security, and performance, finished off with cost optimization and DevOps implementation.
“Little did we know that COVID-19 would test both our new AWS infrastructure and Bespin’s capabilities to the limit….since at the end of March, all Jarir Bookstores closed as the lockdown began, just before Ramadan (April 23 to May 23, 2020), which is generally our busiest time of the year.”
-Mohammed Alzughaibi
The Solution
Starting off Bespin experts first assessed Jarir Bookstores’ current eCommerce environment by leveraging AWS Well-Architected Framework. Comprised of five core pillars i.e. reliability, security, performance, efficiency, and cost optimization, AWS Well-Architected provides a sustainable approach for the evaluation and development of resilient, secure, and efficient high-performing infrastructures for applications & workloads.
Following the assessment Bespin identified several quick wins such as optimizing web servers’ auto-scaling. This was followed by the focus on specific areas of the AWS environment aimed at increasing stability, scalability, security, and performance, finished off with cost optimization and DevOps implementation.
“Little did we know that COVID-19 would test both our new AWS infrastructure and Bespin’s capabilities to the limit….since at the end of March, all Jarir Bookstores closed as the lockdown began, just before Ramadan (April 23 to May 23, 2020), which is generally our busiest time of the year.”
-Mohammed Alzughaibi
1- Improving Stability
“Based on our previous experience,” says Mohammed, “we had very specific requirements for the project. Right upfront, we told Bespin that saving money was not the priority. We were looking for a stable, resilient, and scalable infrastructure to support the business’s demands and goals.”
Our team of experts first worked on splitting the entire infrastructure into 2 (GCC and International) thus equipping Jarir to efficiently distribute web traffic while enjoying more control and flexibility over their infrastructure at the application level. This change fixed the previous configuration that had contained a single autoscaling group and load balancer, prompting it to be the epicenter of failure. We then proceeded to fix the misconfigured AWS Auto Scaling for web server that had been causing a negative impact on response times and user experience.
2- Enhancing Scalability
Through the initial assessment Bespin Global discovered the complex queries that had existed on database, causing it to increase load times of Amazon RDS. We optimized and tuned these database queries, tables, and indexing, leveraging their broad skills in a MySQL and PostgreSQL – compatible relational database built for the cloud in Amazon Aurora. The team also effectively increased the scalability of Amazon RDS by implementing Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud at a database level.
“The Bespin team is incredibly proactive…continuously providing us with ideas and techniques to improve our environment. In fact, I believe their implementation of database autoscaling immediately before COVID-19 was key to our coping with the increased traffic during the pandemic. If it weren’t for Bespin, we probably would have been facing one crisis after another. But once we saw how the system scaled during the first few days, we could sit back, relax, and focus on other projects.”
3- Strengthening Security
“Our internal security practice has always been reactive…based on the level of trust we have in Bespin’s team, we gave them the green light to implement whatever AWS capabilities they felt could add value and enhance security at the infrastructure level to protect Jarir’s digital assets. The next step is to leverage Bespin’s skills and experience to build a companywide security best practice.”
Although Jarir had already deployed Cloudflare, the highly-customizable content delivery network (CDN) service, they faced challenges distinguishing genuine traffic from a DDOS attack, at peak hours. To address this issue, we introduced Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) to the environment, thus effectively protecting Jarir’s web applications and API’s against common web attacks that consume excessive resources and impact availability and security.
In order to increased protection and visibility for Jarir, Bespin Global also deployed AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub. AWS Config will enable Jarir to assess, audit, and evaluate AWS resource configurations; AWS GuardDuty will continuously monitor AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3s for malicious activities and unauthorized behaviors; AWS Security Hub to aggregate, organize and prioritize security alerts across multiple AWS services.
4- Boosting Application Performance
Being challenged by scalability, application log rotation, and limited insight monitoring in both applications and infrastructure, we recommended the replacement of legacy monitoring tools with something in line with their new AWS Strategy. And optimizing the platforms performance at the storage level, ee thus implemented Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to be used with both on-premise resources and AWS cloud services for a simple, scalable, and fully-managed elastic NFS file system.
We also implemented DATADOG Application Monitoring, which is an open platform that aggregates metrics and events across the entire DevOps stack. Datadog integrates an automates application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and log management to provide consolidated and real-time observability across the entire technology stack.
“We’ve been using New Relic One for application monitoring, but we’re in the process of moving to new tools recommended by Bespin. While moving to AWS tools has a cost-benefit for Jarir, the main driver for us is to use tools familiar to Bespin, creating an end-to-end, seamlessly managed environment meeting our requirements.”
5- Total Cost Optimization
“While Bespin’s initial mandate was to ensure reliability and scalability irrespective of cost, once that was accomplished, we looked for ways to optimize costs—especially for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS—and reallocate the savings to other areas.”
Analyzing and leveraging the powerful machine-learning insights of AWS Compute Optimizer, our experts identified optimal compute resources across all EC2 instances inclusive of those allocated to Auto Scaling Groups. This enabled us to effective ly bring the costs of autoscaling down from 54 to 18 (12 – GCC & 6 – International), a 66% reduction that bought Jarir significant cost savings. We also used AWS Saving Plans to optimize costs at the infrastructure’s level, using a flexible pricing model that bought in a 72% saving for AWS compute usage, in addition to the disabling of several unused services.
6- DevOps Implementation
“While DevOps is an essential component to Jarir’s digital transformation, once Bespin had stabilized the environment, we decided to focus on cost optimization before implementing DevOps. As soon that phase is complete, we’ll leverage Bespin’s expertise to create an actionable plan that meets our strategic IT and eCommerce roadmaps.”
Certified as an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, we had already started the creation of a DevOps roadmap for Jarir Bookstores. This roadmap created to complement Jarir’s goals included deploying infrastructure as a code using AWS CloudFormation; AWS AppConfig (a capability of AWS Systems Manager) and AWS OpsWorks for optimizing configuration management; and automating software testing and deployment with AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline.
End Result
“Bespin stabilized and optimized our environment in March 2020. It was just in time. We were ready for COVID-19! We just didn’t know it was coming. When our brick-and-mortar stores closed during the COVID-19 lockdown, website traffic increased by over 200%. During April 2020, we were seeing between 500,000 and 600,000 unique visitors each day—something we’d never experienced before—but there was zero impact on performance. The site auto-scaled exactly the way we wanted, with no downtime or user impact.”
“We’re in an excellent position from an infrastructure perspective,” continues Mohammed. ”When management recently came to ask me to prepare for a new iPhone pre-order campaign, I told them we’re already prepared. Considering our previous experience, they couldn’t believe it! It’s testimony to the skills and commitment of the Bespin team that we’re in the position we are.”
What made Bespin Global different?
“Bespin is unique in that—as a team—they really care about us and our business,” summarizes Mohammed. “Even before we signed with them as our managed services provider, they were quick to jump in and sort out issues when the incumbent vendor couldn’t. Their willingness to do that on our behalf is the basis for our relationship. Since then, it’s just got better and better.”
“I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I’ve given them a call to bring something to their attention, only to find out that they’ve already noticed it and are working on a solution. As the one responsible for Jarir’s online presence, I couldn’t have found a better partner. We’re currently migrating to the latest version of Magento, and we’re thrilled to have Bespin on board. Sometimes we think we have great ideas, but they have extensive Magento experience and aren’t afraid to tell us what works and what doesn’t. That’s a real time-saver and value-add.”
“I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I’ve given them a call to bring something to their attention,” adds Mohammed, “only to find out that they’ve already noticed it and are working on a solution. As the one responsible for Jarir’s online presence, I couldn’t have found a better partner. We’re currently migrating to the latest version of Magento, and we’re thrilled to have Bespin on board. Sometimes we think we have great ideas, but they have extensive Magento experience and aren’t afraid to tell us what works and what doesn’t. That’s a real time-saver and value-add.”
About BESPIN GLOBAL
A recognized global leader, appearing in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services – 2020, Bespin Global MEA is an AWS Premier Consulting and Managed Service Partner, providing state-of-the-art automated cloud solutions & consulting services to businesses in the Middle East and Africa. Helping clients adopt cloud throughout their journey, Bespin Global has the capabilities and experience to assist clients at any stage be it Cloud Strategy & Migration or DevOps & Big Data. Also offering the industry’s most automated and end-to-end cloud management platform in OpsNow, we enable customers to manage their multi-cloud environments through a single comprehensive and insightful platform, providing automated and actionable insights that reduce costs by 30% or more.
- post tags: Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon GuardDuty, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Config, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Savings Plans, AWS Security Hub, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS Well-Architected, DATADOG
