Cloud Migration To AWS For A Social Commerce Platform: Driving Growth & Scalability

The need to migrate to the cloud to power accelerated growth

Since its inception, lifestyle social platform and shopping channel HappyNest has established and scaled its product to provide 10,000+ products and 1000+ expert channels. The team was aiming at a 2X to 3X step up in growth, something that couldn’t be supported reliably with purely the use of local servers. 

They had already witnessed system crashes an average of 2 to 3 times a month (each lasting 10-15 minutes) during peak traffic. This constraint could not afford to get in the way of the ambitious scale-up the platform was headed for.

The HappyNest Mission

Designed as an online platform for home & living, for HappyNest, offering a great digital experience is at the heart of its philosophy.

As Johnny Nguyen, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, HappyNest explains, “Our mission is to bring an inspiring, easy and confident journey to turn a house into a home. The impetus behind this decision to migrate to AWS was to provide a seamless social-commerce platform for Vietnamese consumers to find ideas, connect to professionals and buy interior & decor products.”

Moving home, the journey from on-premise to AWS Cloud

The HappyNest team was looking at a solution that was scalable and would enable them to support high traffic, making the cloud the obvious choice. However, to guide them through this transition, they were on the lookout for a local partner who could help with consultancy in terms of architecture, as well as assist with the very important task of implementing the migration journey from a local cloud to AWS.

Why AWS?

When it came to choosing between the many options in the market, AWS edged ahead for several reasons. Some of the key factors that swung the decision in favor of AWS included:

• Wide range of cloud services including computing power, storage, databases, machine learning, analytics, networking, and more. 
• On-demand scalability and flexibility to allow resources to scale up and down with demand. This in turn would help with cost optimization and the effective handling of varying workloads.
• Global infrastructure with data centers located in multiple regions worldwide meant that HappyNest could deploy applications closer to their users, improving performance as well as reducing latency.
• The maturity and reliability of this well-established and mature cloud provider meant that trust was high.

The goal was to move 2 platforms –  Marketplace & Social Network – to AWS.  The new system needed to be stable while also being able to expand with auto-scaling to adapt to the increasing workloads. All this, while also ensuring cost-optimization best practices were in place and implemented actively.

And that’s where Cloud Kinetics came in.

The great migration to AWS Cloud with Cloud Kinetics

Cloud Kinetics got actively involved in the migration journey, helping HappyNest get acquainted with AWS and the new systems and processes. Key deliverables included creating a solid cloud infrastructure foundation, creating a set of key customer cloud accounts, migrating a representative set of applications to the cloud, and ensuring their satisfactory functioning on the AWS cloud. These were all milestones that were achieved as planned. 

The majority of the workload has now been moved to AWS and HappyNest currently uses EC2, S3, SES, ALB, EFS, CloudWatch, SNS, and CloudFront. And the impact of the migration is tangible.  

“Regular visits, helpful discussions, deep understanding about AWS and our system – Cloud Kinetics really helped us to quickly adapt to AWS and saved us a lot of time & effort. The system is running smoothly now and we are seeing reduced downtime, increased access speed, and a much better user experience.” Johnny Nguyen, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, HappyNest

The numbers speak for themselves, with performance on page and photo loading rising dramatically, no downtime so far, and much-expanded bandwidth – all more than capable of accommodating the ambitious growth plans the company has. 

“Faster, Higher, Stronger”: A partnership for the future

With the migration and some major platform changes at the back end in the rearview, the team is looking forward to bigger and better things. The AWS Start-up line experience has been a great experience for HappyNest – the team appreciates the  superlative financial and networking support from a very accessible and supportive team.

Johnny Nguyen, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, sums it up, “To us, AWS is All Work Superbly, Awesome World-Class Services, Always Well-Supported – with able support from Cloud Kinetics!”