Ultrapower helped ChicV migrate CDN

About ChicV

Established in 2015, Chicv International Holding Limited is an overseas online retail service provider. The company has a large number of its own brands, production and sales of products including clothing, footwear, luggage bags, accessories and other categories. Its main customer groups are located in North America and Europe. In 2021, Chicv is expected to achieve sales over RMB 3 billion.

Business pain points

Chicv has more than 200 self-owned independent brand sites. Before contacting AWS, the main site was hosted on Shopify, a small number of self-built sites were deployed on Linode, and CDN was provided by Cloudflare.

The pain points that drive Chicv to migrate from Shopify (Linode)/Cloudflare to AWS are mainly from the following aspects:

  • High cost of hosted SAAS service: Shopify is an e-commerce platform that provides SAAS services. Shopify charges 0.8% of sales as platform operation service fees, which is equivalent to an annual service fee of approximately US$3 million. Chicv expects that the self-built e-commerce platform can greatly reduce platform service costs.

  • The hosting e-commerce platform has business operation risks: due to intellectual property disputes such as pictures, some of the online stores running on Shopify have been suddenly shut down many times, which caused great losses, Hence Chicv decided to switch from Shopify to self-built platform.

  • Self-built platform maintenance is difficult: The low-cost Linode was used as a self-built platform in the early stage, but Linode only provided basic managed cloud hosting services (IAAS). It is difficult for Chicv’s operation staff to guarantee the business availability of a large number of independent sites simultaneously on Linode.

In this dilemma, Chicv is looking for a cloud provider that can not only provide one-stop technical support services, reduce the migration and maintenance workload of self-built sites but also introduce more advanced technology to assist Chicv in building their own PAAS service platform.

Value to customers

AWS is the world's leading cloud provider. AWS can not only provide customers with basic hosting services, but also has many cloud hosting services that can reduce the complexity of development, operation, and maintenance.

Meanwhile, AWS partners also have rich technical experiences than enable them to provide customers with various solutions including PAAS platform and CDN integration platform.

These services and solutions can fully meet Chicv’s needs.

Solution

In this project, Ultrapower, as an AWS partner, provides Chicv with two solutions, the PAAS platform and the CDN integration platform, as well as the corresponding migration services. The entire solution includes two parts, the PAAS platform and the CloudFront integration platform. The overall architecture is shown in the attached picture.

PAAS platform solution

 The core of the PAAS platform solution is K8S. Around K8S, the platform involves application development, orchestration management, operating environment, service opening, monitoring and analysis, etc.

In this project, Ultrapower provides a customized PAAS platform for Chicv. The platform uses AWS hosting services including ECR, EKS (including EC2, VPC, ALB), EBS, EFS, S3, RDS, Cloudwatch, etc. The third-party products including Rancher, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and all integrates with Chicv’s existing GitLab and Jekins.

Ultrapower assists Chicv in designing network architecture, deployment architecture, and writing automated deployment templates, completing the construction of the entire customized PAAS platform production environment, also completing the configuration and verification of monitoring, alarms, elastic expansion, high availability, blue-green deployment, etc. Compiled related maintenance and operation manuals, and helps Chicv to complete the migration of the production environment.

CloudFront integrated platform solution

The core of the CloudFront integrated platform solution is CloudFront. Based on CloudFront, it includes lambda@Edge-based serviceless image processing, CloudFormation-based automated deployment and upgrades, Lambda-based warm-up, a series of components of S3 and Athena-based CloudFront log analysis. These components greatly reduce the threshold for using CloudFront, assist Chicv in completing the migration of CDN from Cloudflare to CloudFront fast and efficiently, and make up the functional differences between CloudFront and similar products.

Achievement

After the migration is done, more than 90% of online transactions in Chicv are completed on the AWS platform. The original Shopify/Cloudflare platform only retains the remaining small sites that account for less than 10% of the total transaction volume. Linode has been completely closed.

After migrating to AWS, the availability of the business has been significantly improved, and the overall operating cost of the online store's infrastructure has been reduced by 20%, which has brought significant benefit to Chicv.