About Consuela
Consuela celebrates women and fashion by creating products and experiences that inspire joy. Founder and artist Conni Reed launched the brand in Austin, Texas, embracing vivid colors and prints that create purposeful contradictions. Consuela partners with artists and makers around the world to uplift people and honor creators. In addition to online shopping, the brand operates two stores in Texas, along with select product offerings with boutique retailers across the U.S. (consuelastyle.com)
The challenge
Before their move to work with StratusGrid, Consuela was using a major commerce provider’s solution to design and host their e-commerce website. Desiring more flexibility and control, Consuela partnered with a third-party web development company and began the process of a redesign. The development environment was deployed on a single, cloud-hosted virtual machine, and it experienced frequent outages, sometimes lasting for multiple days. Consuela came to StratusGrid for support on how to eliminate downtime, improve video playback and quality issues, and prepare a production-ready website that could handle the traffic demands of the holiday shopping season.
The solution
StratusGrid restructured Consuela’s setup using best practices that both resolved current pain points and set them up for future growth. This involved:
Containerizing the Craft CMS website. Craft CMS is an open-source content management system that allows users to manage content like webpages, images, and videos.
Implementing Amazon ECS on Fargate. A fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
Creating automatic scaling of caching and database services within AWS to handle heavy user traffic.
Setting up Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for automatic workflows between Development and Production environments.
Balancing web traffic with an Application Load Balancer and Cloudfront, a content delivery network designed to deliver a high quantity of files to a large audience.
Implementing AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to improve security and better mitigate cyber-attacks.
With both a development and production environment in place for this new infrastructure, StratusGrid leaves Consuela ready to meet its current goals and implement its vision for the future.
Benefits
User experience:
StratusGrid’s work on caching sessions allows for a better and faster user experience when users browse Consuela’s site. The addition of a JW video player means better video quality and quicker load times for customers across devices.
Inventory upgrades:
API integration updates inventory in real-time based on end-user purchases. Plus, autoscaling helped the website quickly scale from 10 to 1,000 users.
Deployment maturity:
Consuela’s existing deployment pipeline was migrated to AWS and integrated with solutions such as AWS CodePipeline, SonarCloud, and Snyk. Using these state-of-the-art solutions, StratusGrid was able to streamline deployment processes, introduce automated vulnerability and code quality scanning, and better ensure consistency between environments.
Ready for the holiday rush:
StratusGrid’s solutions and holistic approach to problem-solving ensure Consuela is ready to take advantage of their busiest season - the holiday shopping frenzy - efficiently and effectively.
