Fashion Ecommerce Brand Peppermayo Partners with base2Services to Deliver Better Customer Experience

This news release is provided by base2Services on the 13 November 2015

Australian fashion ecommerce site Peppermayo has partnered with cloud consulting firm base2Services to provide its online customers with a more streamlined user experience.

base2Services worked with Peppermayo to move their rapidly growing ecommerce platform to the cloud. Peppermayo’s site receives around 6 million page views per month – a number that’s growing steadily.

Previously, Peppermayo's website had been hosted at a local data centre. The migration to the cloud represents a number of benefits for Peppermayo such as the ability to scale as their customer base grows, greater security, and the ability to make changes to their website through the use of base2Services' ciinabox continuous integration pipeline and development best practices.

base2Services General Manager Melanie Koster was delighted with the opportunity to work with Peppermayo:

"We are happy to assist Peppermayo with their plans for the future. After analysing industry competition, we have put into place the ideal infrastructure to be able to handle the growth the company is seeing."

base2services helped Peppermayo use tools such as GitHub to allow for versioned software code to be stored in the cloud. Continuous integration was built in, allowing for Peppermayo to detect problems early on and rectify them. Chef was used to build cookbooks to help maintain upgrades and patches, along with scripting new environments, all of which form part of base2Services' ciinabox product.

base2services used Amazon Web Services to build the cloud environment. Prior to this, all software code was hosted locally at a datacentre. Once the software was released it would immediately go into production, which wasn’t the best coding practice. The partnership with base2services gives Peppermayo the ability to test and perform staging verification by creating multiple environments that are torn down as soon as testing is completed, and rapidly push into production. Being able to create an environment on demand to match production is vital in staying ahead of the game and handling the ever-increasing amount of customers as the company grows.

Amazon Web Services platform was chosen as the cloud solution due to its ability to enable scaling. Peppermayo's rapidly growing web traffic, which currently stands at more than 1 million visitors per month, requires a highly capable back-end. Big plans warranted the new framework and infrastructure to be able to handle the busy Christmas period.

The partnership and utilisation of Amazon Web Services facilitates current and future growth. The cloud platform allows for scalable deployment of applications. EC2 is built for efficiency and helps save on unnecessary server expenditure. A user can create, launch, and terminate instances as and when needed, paying by the hour for active instances. They are able to handle multi-region architectures, as well as failover support to avoid any site overload. AWS also enables auto-scaling on demand using load balancing. More instances are created as the load is increased, thus enabling rapid expansion. For efficiency, as the load drops off, servers are shut down. The speed was further increased using services such as Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network to leverage browser caching, reducing the overall load on the application.

"Christmas is the busiest time of the year in the ecommerce industry and we were keen on transitioning Peppermayo's site into the cloud in time," base2Services General Manager Melanie Koster said.

base2services migrated Peppermayo's system within two months. Several new processes and procedures were established, and base2Services helped educate Peppermayo's development team (Pivotal Agency) on the new system to ensure everything ran smoothly from the get go. Being provided with best practices regarding security and safety has been paramount in Peppermayo's quick migration. Developing and committing changes into the ciiinabox process will enable quick updates and patches, providing site users with a better overall experience.

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