Cloud migration for an omnichannel retailer

The client is a UK omnichannel retailer whose e-commerce estate had to withstand extreme peak-season traffic. For a retailer, the busiest trading days of the year are also when an outage is most costly.

Their on-prem infrastructure buckled predictably every peak season, turning their biggest revenue opportunities into their biggest operational risks.

The on-prem estate buckled every peak season, turning the retailer's busiest, most valuable trading days into its most fragile. The pattern was familiar and the cost of it was mounting each year.

A straight lift-and-shift risked carrying that fragility into the cloud, paying more for the same failure modes. Simply relocating the problem was not an option.

The re-platform had to be timed and proven against the trading calendar, where an outage on peak day is measured directly in lost revenue. There was no room to get the timing or the capacity wrong.

We migrated the storefront and checkout onto elastic services that scale with demand instead of a fixed hardware ceiling. Elasticity is what turns peak season from a threat into a non-event.

Rather than trust the design on paper, we load-tested against realistic peak-day traffic and tuned until it held with headroom. Proving capacity against real traffic patterns is what gave the business confidence going into peak.

The cutover was scheduled well ahead of the trading calendar, so the new estate had settled before the rush, and we kept a rollback path ready in case peak revealed anything the tests did not. Nothing was left to chance on the day that mattered most.