From a single store off Carnaby Street in London, AllSaints has grown over the past 25 years into a major online fashion retailer. The brand’s website and app attract more than two million visits a month from customers across Europe, Asia, and North America.
As every e-commerce brand knows, online customers do not tolerate the frustration of slow page loads or difficult checkouts. Success depends on a smooth and consistent user experience, even during peak periods. For years, AllSaints met that expectation by running more than 60 servers. Outside of major shopping periods, though, nearly half those servers sat idle, adding unnecessary costs in an industry where margins are already razor thin.
To improve its responsiveness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, AllSaints made the decision to migrate its operations from a hybrid cloud environment to Google Cloud alone. The move required the refactoring of 100 individual services to a new microservices cloud environment. And there was no room for downtime or degradation of performance; the platform had to launch flawlessly, with high availability in every time zone and region around the globe.
The massive scale of the plan made it clear to AllSaints that outside help would be needed, and Google recommended Pythian for the task. As Pythian had already been serving the retailer for two years in a support role, the decision to expand the relationship was an easy one.
This was the biggest infrastructure change in the history of the company, and we wanted to do it in such a way that our customers wouldn’t notice the change. Pythian gave us the advice and support we needed to make that goal a reality.