How Redan gained velocity and efficiency by moving to the cloud

Business benefits of microservices and the cloud

Prior to the implementation of cloud solutions, Redan had one, huge, monolithic app that was to be divided into smaller components. The idea was to create microservices and hold them in the external environment. There are, among others, practical reasons for such a solution because if a certain function in a monolithic app fails – any other component stops functioning as well. Dividing it into microservices means that the whole is able to work without a particular element. So if, for example, the shopping cart in the online store isn't working work – you can still browse the products, compare them with each other, etc. This means that development teams can focus only on fixing a tiny element.

A monolithic app also means, with increased traffic, the need for much more resources, and thus, higher costs of maintaining IT infrastructure. When it comes to microservices at higher load, it's enough to increase the number of user authorization elements. This means we don't need much hardware to handle the sudden increase in traffic since we only increase the number of small components.

Furthermore, after moving the environment to the cloud, the company pays only for the resources it uses. Scalability allows to instantly respond to changes, so there's no need to buy servers for backup, which after the December sales peak, for instance, will be unused. On the one hand, the AWS-based solution guarantees that the company will always have the resources necessary to support its business processes and on the other hand – prevents unprofitable excess.

The process

The entire implementation, as always, started with the IT system and customer needs analysis. Next, we presented the recommended architecture of the solution and later, we carried out the implementation together, working at the headquarters of Redan. We've spent several weeks in there and the effect of our joint work was architecture modification for the most current client needs. 

The most important technical aspects, in this case, were, among others: the use of VPN security between the AWS cloud and Redan data centers, autoscaling, the use of databases and the so-called cloudcross. During each phase of migration, Redan engineers were provided with knowledge about AWS and the key – in this case – Jenkins technology, allowing the automation of software development and testing.