AZURE over AWS for South Africa’s best daily deals site

Learn how our clients cut costs, consolidated resources and ramped up their productivity by migrating to the Cloud.

Year:

2021

Industry:

Retail

Organisation Size:

Medium (50-999 employees)

Products and Services:

Azure Kubernetes
Azure DevOps
Azure Database
Azure cache for Redis
Azure Backup
Azure Disaster Recovery

Case Studies

One Day Only

During 2020, this leading e-tailer saw phenomenal growth of over 40% from the previous comparative period. They were hosting their infrastructure at a local DC. But the increase in demand was creating problems. Predicting what demand you could have is difficult when you host your infrastructure on-prem but is easy to overcome when you use Microsoft Azure. Crimson Line took OneDayOnly.co.za from on-prem to Azure during 2021 resulting in a stress-free 2021 Black Friday.

Business Problem

With on-prem environments, you have to predict spikes in demand. It means paying 100% for the tin, 365 days of the year, while only utilizing 30% of it, 364 days of the year. Any unpredicted variance meant that OneDayOnly’s site became unstable on high demand days. High demand days account for a large percentage towards annual income. When a site is unable to handle the increase in traffic, e-tailers lose out on sales, and get less ROI on marketing spend.

The Solution

Hosting their infrastructure in Microsoft Azure to make use of Azure’s scalability, up and down, together with its reliability, allowed OneDayOnly’s clients to get the daily deals they were planning on buying on Black Friday 2021.

Process

In most instances, a migration starts with a ‘lift and shift’. But OneDayOnly’s previous DC service provider didn’t give them, or us, access to their infrastructure. Adapting to the new set of parameters and restrictions meant that refactoring needed to be done. It resulted in the project taking longer, but it also meant adjustments could be made to OneDayOnly’s applications. This improved the application’s ability to handle the increase in traffic as well as gained redundancy. Both teams had to work closely together to ensure the refactored migration was a success.

Post migration stress-testing was done periodically, with adequate time to spare, before OneDayOnly’s biggest high traffic day, Black Friday, on 29 November 2021.

Deliverables

The application should scale beyond current on-premises capacity and performance. OneDayOnly is moving the application to take advantage of Azure’s on-demand scaling.

OneDayOnly wants to move the application code base to a continuous delivery pipeline. As application changes are pushed to their preferred repository,

The application must be resilient, with capabilities for growth and failover.

OneDayOnly wants to deploy the application in two different Azure regions and set it to scale automatically.

Key Customer Benefits

High Availability

Automatic Scalability

Reduced local server footprint

Reduced IT cost through eliminating server maintenance

DEV / QA environment

More Case Studies

Stay up-to-date with the latest
Crimson Case Studies

Lewis Stores

Lewis Stores move to the cloud

When you’re a national retailer with hundreds of stores nationwide, server replacement is a significant capital expenditure. A cloud solution negates the purchase of new hardware while it has many additional benefits any business can benefit from.

redPanda Software

Aging hardware no longer needs to be a worry

Hosting your own data center means you need to keep track of hardware related issues. Software developers, redPanda, moved ahead of the curve by extending its data centre into Azure before hardware needed to be replaced.

Warwick Estate

Enterprise capabilities for a regional wine estate

The food and beverage industry is a fast moving, competitive one. Warwick Estate’s beautiful vineyards, cellars, restaurant and picnic area is part of the Stellenbosch Winelands. They needed a communication and data technology system that would allow for ease of use but using an ISP email solution was making this difficult. The estate’s location outside of Stellenbosch, meant that their options for internet connectivity was limited. But Crimson Line assured them, limited connectivity didn’t need to keep them out of the cloud.

Get in touch with Crimson Line?

Send us an email, give us a call or pop into our offices and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!

086 111 4496

info@crimsonline.co.za

Offices

Click here for more

Testimonials

Here’s what customers say about Crimson Line

“Honestly what a pleasure to deal with such an efficient company to handle all your IT and Software. The team, sales and engineers, are all super-efficient and handled our company’s software migration with flying colours. If you are looking for a superb, responsive, cost-effective IT company to solve your IT nightmares, look no further. I would recommend them to any company, big or small”.