Minor Lifestyle

The client

Minor Lifestyle is part of Minor International, one of Asia Pacific’s largest hospitality, restaurant, and lifestyle groups with a global presence in 65 countries. Minor Lifestyle distributes a portfolio of international brands like Charles & Keith, Brooks Brothers, and Anello with over 460 points of sales.

The challenge

Minor Lifestyle approached Just After Midnight to help improve the digital performance of one of their key brands, Annello. Annello’s eCommerce site had become key to their revenue growth during the pandemic, as many of their brick and mortar stores had to close.

The Anello eCommerce site, which is hosted on AWS, was experiencing multiple issues:

• The infrastructure that had been provisioned was built without best practices in mind; services were tightly coupled and servers were over-provisioned
• Deployments were slow and error-prone as they were done without automation
• An increase in hosting costs due to an architecture that had not been optimised, and did not make efficient use of the provisioned hardware

The legacy infrastructure had been built by and inherited from another vendor, and Minor’s internal team did not have the knowledge to be able to optimise and maintain it moving forward. They required an expert AWS partner who could design and implement solutions that would cut costs and improve performance, which would ultimately boost revenue for the business.

The solution

As an AWS Advanced Partner, our team of certified AWS solution architects are perfectly positioned to help Minor Lifestyle and Annello optimise their infrastructure. Actions included:

• Refactoring and re-hosting the client’s 16 core applications to run on an Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster
• Modernising several legacy applications using edge-compute Cloudflare Workers, avoiding a major rehaul of the codebase
• Architecting load balancing, application and database tiers to be highly-available
• Resolving a known issue with the core application by implementing self-healing using Kubernetes probes
• JAM conducted a security audit, which led to the implementation of DoS and DDoS mitigation

Once the infrastructure had been optimised, our team of AWS certified engineers and incident managers took on 24/7 dedicated support of the infrastructure.

Results

• The rearchitected infrastructure reduced the client’s AWS spend by 40%
• Known issues were resolved, and the performance, stability and scalability of the infrastructure was vastly improved
• Dedicated 24/7 infrastructure support significantly improved uptime of the overall site, protecting the client’s revenue and reputation