Focused on Product Innovation
Tailor Brands has a relatively small technical team so it is important that they can concentrate on business and application development and not waste time on day-to-day infrastructure issues.

DoiT recently helped Tailor Brands move most of their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads to Amazon EC2 Spot Instances (Spot Instances) to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

It was a big project that covered multiple production environments. Today, most of Tailor Brands’ computing is done using cost-effective Spot Instances. DoiT and Tailor Brands worked together to achieve a smooth migration to Spot Instances from more expensive on-demand instances.

The project achieved a cost reduction of 35 percent for the company at time of deployment, with hopes for even higher reductions as the system is fine-tuned.

DoiT has also helped with operational expenditure by providing tools to give Tailor Brands improved transparency into its AWS spending.

DoiT worked with the Tailor Brands finance team to use monitoring tools including Amazon CloudWatch (CloudWatch) and CloudHealth for AWS. This means they can warn engineering teams about excessive expenditures in specific areas rather than just making a general statement that costs are too high.

The team can dig into why figures are high for that period and provide the details for an informed conversation, enabling them to consider what can be done to reduce costs without disrupting performance or product development. This helps make sure the company is making the best use of different AWS instance types to get the best value for its money.

Being part of the DoiT portfolio also improves Tailor Brands’ access to AWS support and helps determine which issues are better dealt with internally and which would benefit from AWS guidance.

Spotting the Savings
As a web-based business, Tailor Brands experiences fluctuating demand. So basing its infrastructure on AWS means not having to worry about having insufficient capacity to meet unexpected peaks in demand.

Tailor Brands runs most of its systems on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

It uses Amazon EKS to manage clusters, something it previously did on its own but found to be a burden on the team. Moving its development functions to Amazon EKS has given its engineers low-cost access to a production-like environment.

Tailor Brands relies on Amazon ElastiCache to reduce request demands on its databases. The company uses Amazon Athena running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as part of its data lake. It also uses Amazon Redshift for deeper analytical work and Amazon SageMaker for machine-learning programming.

Tailor Brands keeps a close eye on SageMaker and other AWS machine-learning services with the aim of exploring a move to more managed services. This will reduce management overhead and focus everyone on business value.

It is also evaluating AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift (AQUA), which is a hardware-accelerated cache that can speed up some queries by as much as 10 times.