Buyatab transforms consumers’ gift-buying experience by migrating to AWS

The obstacles they faced

Buyatab is growing at a rapid pace and making its mark. It was ranked number two on PROFIT 500: The Complete Ranking of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies in 2017 and number three the year before. With its rapid growth, the company needed to find a time- and cost-saving way to transform its startup phase infrastructure into a new scalable and flexible IT environment. Buyatab’s technology team also recognized that the company needed to make a transition toward continuous deployment.

Also, in the short term, as a provider of branded gift card e-commerce experiences for companies, Buyatab’s infrastructure needed to be rock-solid during the exceptionally busy gift-buying holidays and seasons.

What we achieved together

Buyatab’s cloud migration wasn’t a lift-and-shift, but rather a fully transformational migration that allowed it to take advantage of features within AWS that simply aren’t available anywhere else, including storage service capabilities, sophisticated architecture and highly advanced security features. “This is a level of infrastructure that most technology organizations could only fantasize about,” said Falk.

Rackspace Technology worked with Buyatab to turn some time-intensive manual processes into automated processes, which improved consistency, availability and security. When Buyatab completed its final cutover to AWS from its existing data center, the 60-minute procedure was performed 25 minutes faster than planned.

Since the migration, Buyatab has seen significant improvements to storage, architecture, networking and security, as well as improved reliability, a high level of redundancy, continuity and disaster recovery. Documentation has been created to help with the onboarding of new staff, and to track and document design decisions.

Additionally, AWS Systems Manager is being leveraged to help make routine tasks easier, and log collection and metric data is being collected centrally to provide additional visibility, with enhanced capabilities for analysis on the roadmap. Perhaps the biggest benefit is the avoidance of a massive capital outlay that would have been required for an on-premises solution.

A DevOps culture has been embraced and is helping the Buyatab team become more agile and able to deploy application updates with a much higher level of consistency and significantly less effort. The application stacks have higher levels of recovery and availability, and they will scale much easier to match seasonal workloads.

“There’s sometimes chatter about how expensive the cloud could be,” said Falk. “But that expense happens with overprovisioning in what you require and not using best practices. When you’re working with a partner that has years of experience, like Rackspace Technology, you simply don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”