Ulta enhances digital customer experience

The obstacles they faced

Preparing for Black Friday

Ulta Beauty’s guests look to ulta.com for an online experience that mirrors the ease, delight and variety they expect in the store. In late 2012, as they were facing some challenges with the upcoming Black Friday, time was of the essence to quickly deliver improvements to support the online guest experience.

To start, they needed to create a consistent look and feel, mirroring the design of their advertising circulars — with the biggest sales getting the largest real estate on the page. And the team needed the flexibility to quickly rearrange and update the page as items sold out, without the need for caching. The goal was to prevent guests from diving deeper into a product when it had already sold out and become unavailable.

At the time, the process of updating sold-out items was handled manually. Inventory planners and merchants would watch the inventory levels and, each hour, communicate out-of-stock conditions to the creative team, who would add a “sold out” label to the product image. The IT team would then sync the updated images during its hourly batch run.

Ulta Beauty is always trying to improve to deliver a great guest experience for the holiday and throughout the year.

What we achieved together

Flexibility and agility to support continued growth

But Ulta Beauty is never complacent with their website performance and reliability. And in 2015, they were ready to take on the next stage of their transformation.

They wanted to take full advantage of current technology architectures, for increased capacity at a reduced expense. So, they started by switching from an Oracle standard agreement to an Oracle unlimited license agreement, which provides flexible deployment options, like virtualization.

“[The unlimited license agreement] really gives us even more flexibility with Rackspace Technology, because now we can put in the latest and greatest processors. We can have it be virtualized,” said Pacynski. “[Virtualization] allows us to scale the infrastructure as traffic volumes grow.”

That year, they migrated over 70 servers within Rackspace Technology to newer platforms, allowing them to easily add on-demand capacity to all of their environments — including production, stress, multiple non-production development and test environments, and disaster recovery.

Specifically, they migrated their existing Dell R710 / R720 servers to new HP DL380s; replaced or upgraded roughly 45 physical Dell R710 / R720 servers; replaced or upgraded 4 Dell R720 hypervisor servers; and replaced or upgraded 25 existing VMs.

The environment refresh also involved an upgrade to their core infrastructure and application software stack, to include: RHEL 6.7; Apache 2.2.15, JBoss EAP 6, Mod_JK 1.2.40, JDK 1.8; Commerce 11.2, Endeca 6.5.2; and Oracle 12C.

More importantly, they implemented a dual-site solution, where two guest-facing sites share a single domain and database backend. This allows both sites to work in an active-active fashion, splitting traffic 50%-50% during heavy sales seasons. It also makes it possible for them to immediately switch to the other site if there is ever a problem, allowing them to continue with business as usual.

As a result, ulta.com experiences zero-downtime deployments, the freedom to beta test new feature functions by controlling traffic flow and almost real-time disaster-recovery capabilities.

Leveraging the Rackspace Technology relationship

In late summer 2016, during Ulta Beauty’s routine stress testing, they identified a capacity constraint at the network layer. With only a few weeks remaining before their peak season, they collaborated with their partners, including their dedicated team at Rackspace Technology.