Laying down a solid foundation: How Zen helped Connection Flooring migrate to the cloud
- Sector = Online retail
- Use case - Migration & Modernisation
- Zen Product = Well Architected Design Service, Managed Services and Professional Services
Connection Flooring Limited
Since starting up in 2012, Connection Flooring Limited’s business has gone from strength to strength. The group - made up of Direct Wood Flooring Limited, Grass Direct Limited, and Flooring Superstore Limited - has continually improved its catalogue of products, delivery network, service standards, and people investment From their warehouses and showrooms to their ecommerce platform, Connection Flooring strive to offer a seamless, efficient, and hassle-free experience to their customers.
The challenge
As part of their journey of continual improvement, Connection Flooring identified an opportunity toimprove their software deployment process. Previously a manual task undertaken during the night, the deployment process would often result in staff fatigue, issues with work-life balance and staff absence following long nights of rolling out updates. Wanting to implement a better solution for their people and customers alike, Connection Flooring turned to Zen for their AWS expertise. The business required an optimal design for running their workloads in AWS – one that was secure, highly available, high performing, and cost-efficient.
The solution
Through Zen’s Well-Architected Design Service, Zen worked closely with Connection Flooring to understand the business’s environment, challenges, and requirements, creating an optimal design for running their unique workloads in AWS. The result was an AWS migration that helped automate many of Connection Flooring’s manual processes. Zen implemented Amazon ElastiCache for Connection Flooring’s Redis cache, and provided a fully managed,highly available Database utilising Amazon Relational Database Service. For the web layer, a highly available, autoscaling architecture was provided, using Amazon Elastic File System for a managed, scalable file share that would serve content to a dynamic number of webservers.The deployment processas re-imagined by integrating AWS CodeDeploy to automate the process. In addition to improving deployment efficiency, Zen provisioned isolated deployment and staging environments – linked with the deployment pipeline process – to ensure that deployments could be thoroughly tested and tweaked prior to production release. These non-production environments prove incredibly cost effective, due to automations put in place that switch the resources off when not in use – resulting in no operating costs.
The benefits
With greater flexibility, cost savings, and a solution that helps to make life and work easier for their own people, Connection Flooring have benefited greatly from their AWS migration. With Zen’s help, the business has experienced:
- Noticeably quicker web responses
- A centrally managed platform with unified authentication methods
- An automated deployment pipeline process
- Robust, cost-effective non production environments.
Connection Flooring continue to work closely with Zen to further modernise and optimise their workloads, and both businesses look forward to what the future holds.
