E-commerce player Zovi uses Amazon Web Services for a faster go-to-market and to eliminate infrastructure set-up and maintenance overheads
By Heena Jhingan
Online fashion retailer Zovi, founded in 2010, has grown by leaps in the Indian market and is a strong contender in the fray, along with older players like Myntra.com and Fashionandyou.com. The Bangalore-based e-tailer has recently has acquired rival firm Inkfruit. However, three years back when the business was still at the planning stage, the founders were still wary of the right way to approach a highly competitive market.
Nevertheless, the company went ahead and decided to use the Internet as the primary channel to market its apparel and accessories. Currently, Zovi employs150 people at its offices in Bangalore and Gurgaon, but these numbers are soon to change with new developments.
The first step to starting the business was to establish an infrastructure, which meant investing in hardware systems, development platform, etc. Like any other start-up, capex was a matter of concern and the company wanted to be as frugal as possible. The obvious route to start was to go the cloud way, using infrastructure as a service.
Zovi thus relied on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and subscribed to several offerings from the cloud giant: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Glacier, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).
Satish Mani, CTO, Engineering Leadership, Zovi, recalls that right from the start they were very clear that they needed their infrastructure and technology to grow in accordance with the growth of the business, which ruled out huge investments in infrastructure at the initial stages of the business.
“Also, we believed that it made more sense to invest resources on our core goal of software development and not on hardware infrastructure and associated maintenance,” he says.
Before Zovi decided to use the Amazon services, the only other option it considered was a hardware co-located solution in India. However, the company discarded the idea after considering and evaluating the initial capital expenditure and operational expenses that would need to be incurred in case of co-location.
Says Mani, ”Cloud is defined by its benefits and we use AWS cloud to save huge capital and operating costs, as well as to increase our business agility.” In the e-commerce business, the players require to maintain consistency of the service for customers. Therefore, Zovi needed infrastructure (both hardware and software) across the spectrum to match its architectural needs.
“With AWS’s many years of experience and its customer references around the world, including large e-commerce companies using the AWS cloud platform, we were convinced that that AWS would be a suitable solution provider for us,” explains Mani.
Cloud concerns
Despite being a cost savior, cloud is not an easy choice for CIOs. The concerns around uptime, security and service persistently haunt them. Mani says that these criteria were on their priority list as well while looking for a solution provider.
“Amazon’s security offering proved to be more effective than anything that we would have managed on our own. AWS has achieved Level 1 compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is a boon for online merchants using AWS cloud services,” he says.
Zovi has been using AWS since February 2011 and it took the company only three months to develop, deploy and have its system deliver revenue to the business.
There are several other benefits that Zovi claims to have earned by using AWS. Since using the AWS cloud, Zovi is believed to have scaled from 50 visitors a day to 100,000 visitors with no developer or infrastructure intervention required to enable that.
Downtime can mean disaster for an e-commerce site. Therefore, cloud users have to be very careful while selecting the cloud solution provider.
Mani informs,” We have used the best practices in architecting our applications using the multiple availability zones of the AWS cloud platform for high availability and high fault tolerance right from the start. With that, we have put in place our business continuity planning and disaster recovery measures.”
Besides major savings on infrastructure costs, a key advantage that Zovi enjoyed by moving to the cloud was shorter time to market.
“In terms of tangible benefits, using AWS has helped us avoid spending US$1 million in initial capital expenses for hardware and we saved US$200,000 on annual operating expenses. We are also able to save months of development man-days and scale dramatically from 50 visitors to 100,000 visitors per day in a matter of minutes without any of our internal team’s intervention,” the CTO says.
The deployment of the solution was smooth, but there was an initial phase of adapting to the system. “Also, in the beginning there were some features that we needed but initially they were not available; however, AWS implemented several of them over a period of time, as these features were already part of their road map. On the whole, we have had a pleasant experience using AWS thus far,” he says.
Mani signs off saying that they will continue to use AWS cloud as their strategic growth platform in the future and the company will look forward to using the new and innovative services developed by AWS.
