Notonthehighstreet.com has global shoppers in sight with move to hybrid cloud
- Summary:
- IT director Yoann Martin explained how the rapidly growing online retailer is in the process of breaking up its application to prepare for expansion with a virtualised environment.
Notonthehighstreet.com was launched in 2006 by a couple of entrepreneurs at a kitchen table, where they had the idea to bring together the most original
and creative ideas from small businesses and sell them online. Give the independents a collective, online shop window. Fast forward a few years and the site now has hundreds of thousands of products on its website and last year generated transactions in excess of £83 million. This rapid growth has meant that the company has had to reconsider the structure of its infrastructure and application, and as it plans for global expansion, wants to take advantage of a heavily virtualised environment.I spoke to Notonthehighstreet.com's IT director, Yoann Martin, who explained how the online retailer had previously been using a traditional server farm to host its application, which occasionally burst to Rackspace's public cloud during peaks in demand. However, now that the company is planning to acquire customers abroad it needed an environment that would be more flexible and scalable over the long term – and as a result, it has just completed a rollout to a Rackspace hybrid cloud environment.
Rackspace will now manage the computing, storage, networks and operating systems of Notonthehighstreet.com, and will also provide support services for complex tools and application stacks. But will still make use of the provider's public cloud during peak times. The online retailer is also planning to take advantage of increased automation and orchestration, being made possible by the virtualised environment, to boost its DevOps capabilities. A number of other considerations have also become important to the retailer as it has matured, such as security and disaster recovery – which it believes Rackspace can provide a better service, than it can create internally. Martin said:
However, the move to a private cloud is only part of the the retailer's plans. Since it launched its core application, it has grown organically and become increasingly complex. For example, to begin with, Notonthehighstreet.com was just having to manage three core domains – customers, partners and products. However, it now has promotion alerts, merchandising, wedding lists, etc. Martin said that the application is now “monolithic” and has become “increasingly complex”.Our main drive is more virtualisation, being able to utilise resource much more dynamically. As you can imagine, the ecosystem of the application is becoming a lot more diversified. We have a lot more scaling challenges, our business is getting a lot bigger, so we need to be able to scale a lot quicker – so again having a much more virtualised environment is going to allow us to respond to those challenges a lot more efficiently.
I'd like to point out that having the private cloud is one thing, but so much goes with that in terms of tooling and orchestration, and automation. One goes with the other. Having a virtualised environment doesn't help you much unless you have the right tools in place.
Consequently, the retailer has begun the process of breaking up the application into separate functions so that it is easier to manage as it continues to grow. Martin said:
The fact that we are breaking it up will allow us a lot more flexibility in terms of how we can scale, that's really looking towards our international expansion. It's a lot harder to scale horizontally when you have a monolithic application. We can tailor the environment towards what our needs are as a business.
Having a more virtualised environment is going to allow us to be a lot more flexible in what we can do with those services, where we deploy them, how we deploy them to respond to peak times. Our business is a lot more demanding in how quick we must develop new features, so that in itself is leading us to break up the application and the whole environment on which it sits. Having our traditional server farm would give us a lot less flexibility in terms of deploying those components. It's the whole picture – it's infrastructure, it's tooling, but it's also our delivery pipeline.
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Martin finished by saying that although this is still a programme that is in its early stages (with regards to the restructuring of the application), it is one
that is going to deliver business value through the next stage of the company's growth.It's an initiative that we launched earlier this year as a global strategy. We have delivered some smaller services, but now we need to tackle the core aspect of the application. It's going to be evolving programme – our strategy is to keep delivering business value along the way.
It's not about undergoing a massive transformation for the sake of it, it's more about us taking business opportunities along the way to make it happen. For me to put a timeline against it would not be appropriate, it's a project that will never complete because the business will change and priorities will change.