Paazl might not be your everyday household name, but if you’re part of the e-commerce world the name will no doubt be familiar. Paazl is a leading platform for multi-carrier e-commerce shipping. They enable enterprise-level businesses to show their customers a variety of delivery options during checkout, as well as send, manage and track their deliveries all over the world. In order to provide their clients with a consistent, high-quality service throughout the entire year, they needed a highly scalable solution that could keep up, even during peak moments like Black Friday.
To help them migrate from their local infrastructure, Paazl contacted a Cronos venture called ScaleCity, an expert in managed cloud containers on Google Cloud Platform. Google tech and Cronos expertise coming together to create amazing solutions for our clients is something we at GC innovate firmly support, which is why we had a chat with Robert Bank, head of Software Development at Paazl, to talk about the choice for Google, Cronos and cloud native architecture.
Black Friday
As anyone in the industry knows, retail is a business with strong demand peaks throughout the year. And when your business is trusted by popular global brands like Tag Heuer, VanMoof and Under Armour, to provide a high-end checkout and delivery service, you need to make sure that your service can keep up throughout the entire year. And in this year-long calendar there is one date marked in red: Black Friday.
Before contacting ScaleCity, Paazl were running their monolithic application on a private cloud solution. Robert: “We actually investigated moving to a public cloud several years ago. Back then we decided against it due to security concerns, but honestly I think we just weren’t ready to take the option seriously yet.”
Though the managed private cloud solution did what it had to, it had some issues regarding scalability: capacity expansions needed to be announced weeks in advance, which seriously hampered Paazl’s scaling agility. Migrating to a cloud-native architecture seemed like the logical choice, but this is easier said than done.
Luckily, ScaleCity was there to assess Paazl’s current infrastructure and formulate a plan for migration. Robert: “Google Cloud seemed like the most obvious choice for us because we were already using a lot of their services, like Maps integration. We talked to a number of Google Cloud specialists but it was ScaleCity that really caught our eye. ScaleCity combined the agility of a smaller company with the broad expertise of De Cronos Groep, which made them a perfect partner for us.”
After their initial ‘lift and shift’ migration to the cloud, Paazl is now also further optimizing their application towards a more cloud native architecture, a project which is still ongoing. Meanwhile, ScaleCity also supported Paazl with tools and best practices to run their old ‘on-premises’ architecture while it is phased out.
In summary, ScaleCity not only helped us with our immediate migration needs, but also gave our people the knowledge and confidence to manage our infrastructure ourselves, and that was the real long-term goal all along.”
Security First
Although the scalability of Google’s Cloud Platform has been the star of the show, it is worth addressing the security requirements as well. Robert: “As you can imagine, as a shipping platform we deal with a lot of personal and sensitive data. Though scalability was our most pressing need, security always remained our top priority.”
Google shares this exact mindset, which is why Google has built security into every layer of its Google Cloud Platform. Many companies still consider the cloud to be a security risk, while in fact the total opposite is true.
Regardless of your industry, there’s a good chance security and scalability are also on your IT infrastructure priority list. GC innovate is here to connect your business with experts like ScaleCity to unlock the power of your business with Google technology. Get in touch, and you’ll soon find yourself talking with the perfect expert to help you realise your businesses’ ambitions.
About ScaleCity
ScaleCity is an expert in managed cloud containers on Google Cloud Platform and part of de Cronos Groep.They offer scalable, automated solutions on their self-developed deployment platform, optimised for websites and web applications (Drupal, WordPress, Laravel, microservices, node.js). Based upon that knowledge and experience, they also help companies with the do’s and don’ts in terms of efficiency, performance, redundancy, reliability, continuous deployment & integration.
