Key Challenges and Context: Building an Ecommerce Platform Without the Infrastructure to Match
Our client, a European ecommerce company, had built its name over decades helping families mark important moments. Their high-quality birth and wedding cards reached customers through physical catalogues and local resellers.
When buying patterns changed, the company created a separate digital brand focused on ecommerce. The new platform let customers design and personalize greeting cards online from their homes, moving a traditional product into a self-service format.
Our client had a growing in-house development team and a clear vision for the customer experience. What they lacked was the infrastructure expertise to bring it to life at scale.
They needed a high-performance cloud setup that could:
- Handle seasonal spikes in traffic without downtime
- Offer real-time monitoring and performance tuning
- Give developers the autonomy to release and update features quickly
- Scale seamlessly as their ecommerce operations grew
But building that kind of infrastructure from scratch-on AWS, with automation and monitoring built in-would require time, knowledge, and resources they did not have in-house. Relying on traditional hosting models or ad hoc infrastructure management was no longer sustainable. They needed a partner who could design, run, and evolve their cloud foundation while keeping their internal team in the loop.
Our Approach: Scalable Cloud Architecture, Built the Right Way from Day One
Our role was to design and implement a scalable, cloud-native foundation on AWS that supported our client’s growth, gave their team flexibility, and removed the burden of daily infrastructure management.
Here is how we approached it:
1. Co-designing a cloud foundation tailored for ecommerce performance
We worked with our client and our Software Product Engineering team to architect a setup that prioritized speed, scalability, and reliability. From the start, our focus was on building a clean, cloud-native infrastructure on AWS that could support a snappy user experience-even during peak shopping seasons.
2. Deploying with Infrastructure as Code
We built the entire environment using CloudFormation templates, allowing every piece of infrastructure to be versioned, repeatable, and fully transparent. This made the platform easier to maintain and evolve, whether by our Managed Services team or our client’s internal developers.
3. Balancing legacy and modern components in a unified stack
One of the challenges was integrating some legacy systems into the new cloud-native setup without creating bottlenecks. We designed a hybrid architecture that allowed these older components to operate within the new system without sacrificing performance or observability.
4. Giving visibility and control with Datadog monitoring
To give both teams peace of mind, we integrated Datadog across all infrastructure components. With real-time monitoring and alerting in place, the team could spot potential issues early and keep performance high without the need for constant manual oversight.
5. Supporting the client independence with our experts’ backup
Our client wanted to stay hands-on where possible, so we made sure their team had the right access and understanding to make minor changes on their own. Our Managed Service offering handled complex operations, maintenance, and stability requirements while giving them flexibility in how they work with us.
Benefits: A Future-Proof Platform That Scales with the Business
With a custom-built AWS infrastructure managed by our team, our client was able to focus on what mattered most: delivering a fast, smooth shopping experience to their customers. The technical foundation we implemented gave them the reliability and agility they were looking for-without requiring them to build internal cloud expertise from scratch.
Here is what changed for them:
- The custom setup enabled specific performance adjustments, keeping the platform fast during seasonal traffic spikes, without the usual template restrictions or shared hosting constraints.
- Thanks to our Infrastructure as Code approach, every change could be tested, tracked, and rolled back if needed. The client team could make updates and improvements worrying about breaking production.
- With our Managed Service handling complex operations, our client avoided hiring and training a cloud operations team. They used our DevOps specialists for technical improvements while managing day-to-day changes themselves.
- Datadog integration provided both teams complete system visibility, cutting troubleshooting time and catching problems before customers noticed them.
- The cloud-native setup let our client expand when ready, adding features, regions, or capacity without infrastructure becoming a bottleneck.
Ready to Build a Scalable Cloud Foundation?
If your team is looking to launch or modernize a cloud-native ecommerce platform on AWS, we can help.
