Ibraheem al.qurashi
migrating an e-Commerce website database to aurora with minimal downtime
Ibraheem al.qurashi
migrating an e-Commerce website database to aurora with minimal downtime
region
KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA
COMPANY Type
eCommerce – B2C
industry
Health & Beauty
website
About Ibraheem Al.Qurashi
Founded in 1929, in the city of Mecca, Ibraheem Al Qurashi (IAQ) Perfumes is one of the most recognizable brands in its industry, not just within Saudi Arabia, but across the Gulf. Inspired by the luxury perfume trade of bygone years, IAQ specialized in the sale of Amber Oud. Commonly refereed to as liquid gold this oud is a popular middle-eastern dark & scented resin that costs upwards of $5000/lb. Known also for its unique, high-quality and distinctive perfume blends, the company quickly opened its first showroom in Jeddah, and currently operates with a strong presence of brick-and-mortar stores across KSA, Kuwait, Oman, and UAE.
With the goal of establishing itself as the world’s brand name for oriental perfumes by 2025, and adopting to industry trends and customer demands, the company launched it’s online prescience with an eCommerce Platform – offering a comprehensive range of fragrances while combining the quality and character of Saudi scented products.
The Challenge
The speed and performance of a businesses online platform has a direct effect on business revenue, irrespective of the same being a website or mobile application. It is why such metrics are highly regarded and essential for eCommerce merchants across the globe. From that same perspective, IAQ wanted to solve all the problems they were facing with regards to the reliability, performance, and latency of their online platform, and following our experts’ investigations and discussions with the client team, the cause for IAQ’s problems was determined to be with their Database.
IAQ used MariaDB and it couldn’t support their fast-paced growth in the market. It resulted in the database quickly becoming the main reason for the platforms low performance, frequent latency peak, replica tags, requirement for numerous security patches, and the increasing operating costs without positive outcomes. Additionally, running all the 4 company databases with MariaDB, with essentially the same problems across all the them, IAQ had heavily considered increasing their MariaDB’s size by 12X to solve their problems. This would not be the recommended practice for the scenario.
The Solution
Our team of experts first started with AWS Well-Architected to assess Ibraheem Al.Qurashi’s environment. AWS Well-Architected, based on five core pillars, (reliability, security, performance, efficiency, cost optimization, and operational excellence) equips our expert team with the necessary insights and knowledge they require to identify the different quick wins that can be achieved. In the case of IAQ, the wins were achieved by using AWS DMS Service to migrate customer databases from MariaDB RDS to Aurora Cluster. Additionally, the evaluation also relieved that Aurora RDS would be the most efficient engine, combining the speed & availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity & cost-effectiveness, commonly enjoyed on open-source databases.
Only AWS Services were used as part of the solution, this included Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Data Migration Service (DMS), Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Route53
Starting with AWS Data Migration Service (DMS) our experts migrated Ibraheem Al.Qurashi from MariaDB to Aurora MySQL RDS with almost no downtime to the client, and considering AWS Best Practices with regards to connecting the source and target database to a DMS replication instance, our experts configured a network and connected the two AWS resources, as a replication Instance in the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Moving on, the next AWS service utilized by Bespin Global for IAQ was Amazon Route 53, and its Domain Name System web service (DNS), where the Local DNS fail overs enables for a variety of low-latency, and fault-tolerant architectures. By using Route 53, we quickly switched the application database connection from MariaDB to Aurora MySQL, by managing the client’s end-users to be routed on to the applications endpoints. This newly created RDS is encrypted with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create and manage keys, whilst controlling the use of encryption across AWS Services to ensure security, reliability, and built-in auditing.
With regards to the Managed Services delivered to Ibraheem Al.Qurashi, we equiped IAQ with the flexibility to scale services on-demand; take advantage of the services high-availability of over 99.99%; and 24/7/365 integrated support services which includes application & network monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery. Our Managed Services Team worked directly with the consulting team to evaluate every metric and log collected from IAQ’s infrastructure & applications – optimizing the workload components on security levels, and enabling AWS Best Practices to also optimize operations and cost.
Our Managed Services team supports our clients with periodic recommendations, based not only off evaluations from data logs but also through metrics from the team that is using the AWS native tools like Compute Optimizer and CloudWatch.
AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor the RDS’ and application’s performance which the service assists in through numerous out-of-the-box dashboards that observe the health and usage of client cloud deployments including CPU Usage, Disk Read/Write, Network In/Out and much more.
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.
