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CARAJÁS HOME CENTER
Executive Summary
About the Client
In 2020, Carajás made investments in its digital operation by implementing an e-commerce, expanding its capacity to operate throughout the national territory. The online sales platform has a complete basket of products sold in all units of the network.
And the investments don't stop there. Believing that the raison d'être of the entire company is the customer, the home center also has the Carajás app (available for download on Android and iOS platforms) and Telesales 4003-2020, by phone or via Whatsapp. We understand that this is a way to expand the search for new markets and possibilities for the company to operate.
Carajás Home Center
Carajás was founded in 1973, in Maceió, and became one of the most important home centers in Brazil, occupying the 8th position in the ranking of construction material stores, according to Anamaco. With solid partnership with the main industries of the segment, the company that solutions in construction material, finishing, maintenance, home and decoration, and technology. Over more than 49 years of history, Carajás has been operating in the retail market and has accelerated its expansion project with 10 stores distributed in five states in the Northeast: Alagoas, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará and Piauí. Customer focus, humility, unity and teamwork, result orientation and owner pain form the values that are incorporated into the company's philosophy.
Case Description
What was proposed:
The customer finding it difficult to manage the company's infrastructure together with its branches, the customer contacted Valcann informing the real needs they were facing, in short the customer's infrastructure was an architecture in at least two layers, based on the application layer and the database layer. Our first initiative was to organize a strategy to deconjugate the workload little by little, in order to receive quick results from this action and allow time to manage a possible code restructuring.
A client active in the home center sector, CARAJAS has a very frenetic ecommerce scenario due to customer accesses. Initially there was an increase in computational resources to probe the architecture's behavior, but over the months the workload was controlled with the use of EC2 and RDS. In the modernization aspect, Lambda was implemented to automate some query calls in the environment. Implemented a CloudFront to facilitate the delivery of content in several regions without any impediments.
All information captured from users is stored in an S3 bucket using Intelligent-Tiering as a solution.
The client owns a network of building material stores, so the scalability of this business is extremely high. And so there must be availability and resilient protection of the environment. At first, we used the Well-Architected framework to visualize the gaps of the pillars that existed in the client, and then we restructured the environment in the following services:
Application Load Balancer in the EC2 server layer;
Database autoscaling in the Amazon Aurora data layer;
Amazon Cloud Front to deliver contents as fast as possible;
S3 Standard to save logs and implemented S3 versioning;
Elastic IP is enabled for each instance to block a static IP;
All of the AWS services used:
EC2, ALB, Autoscaling, MS SQL Server, Route 53, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, S3, Transfer Family, Data Transfer.
AWS services are deployed, including virtual private clouds (VPCs), availability zones, subnets, and connections to systems outside of AWS. We fractionate the workload into three classes: front-end applications (hosted on public subnets), back-end applications (hosted on private subnets), databases (hosted on private subnets). To move forward with other activities - such as payment gateways, general product registration, and inventory storage - they use REST APIs.
Elements deployed outside of AWS, e.g. on-premises components, or hardware devices:
Hashicorp Vault, for storing passwords and secrets; Hashicorp Terraform for infrastructure as Code.
Customer issues and concerns that have been overcome:
1. Operational excellence
1.1. Implementation of continuous monitoring;
1.2. Integrated connectivity with high available multi zone (Multi-AZ);
2. Security
2.1. Restriction of external access to the environment, with segregation between private and public subnets for back and front end, respectively;
2.2. Access to the AWS environment for VPN-only administration;
2.3. Encryption of data at rest and in transit.
3. Reliability
3.1. Multiple instance nodes, making it possible to balance reading and writing operations;
3.2. Minimal failover between nodes;
3.3. Automatic backups of the database layer;
4. Excellence in performance
4.1. Calculation of expected environment demand for rightsizing.
5. Cost optimization
5.1. The monitored environment, with a continuous flow of monitoring for rightsizing.
Key Results:
AWS managed infrastructure service;
Professional managed services provided;
22% performance gain in application response time;
Centralization of store operations on the AWS cloud infrastructure;
Implementation of previously not implemented security practices.
Lessons learned:
The implementation of AWS services, allowed us to focus more on the business aspects of the project;
Although the planning of projects like this is important, the need for experimentation on the part of the client proved to be fundamental. In this sense, the use of AWS enables a rapid prototyping of architectures;
Using the AWS Well-Architected framework as a reference helps us to make clear to the customer the value of a good service partner.
Architecture Diagram
