Merchize has Successfully Reduced Computing Costs by up to 70% with an EKS Strategy on AWS Spot Instances

Vietnam is currently experiencing a boom in eCommerce. The number of sellers using e-commerce is rapidly increasing, as more businesses aim to expand and venture into international markets to introduce Vietnamese products globally.

Merchize has consulted with AWS and VTI to transition their platform from a single-tenant environment to a multi-tenant environment.

About Merchize

Founded in 2019, Merchize is a comprehensive eCommerce platform in Vietnam, empowering small businesses and retailers to increase revenue and showcase Vietnamese products to the global community. Merchize provides order production and fulfillment services, as well as website development for eCommerce businesses and retailers.

While most of their customers are in Vietnam, the company has grown rapidly and is now present in the United States and Europe. Customers can choose on-demand services, including special requests such as setting up storefronts for e-commerce and comprehensive support, including order fulfillment. Merchize currently manages thousands of e-commerce pages for its customers.

Merchize has successfully reduced computing costs by up to 70% with an EKS strategy on AWS Spot Instances.

During operations, Merchize realized that “optimizing computing costs” is indeed a challenge. In eCommerce, dealing with massive amounts of data and high demands for website access speed requires businesses to possess a stable, high-speed, secure platform, along with reasonable cost considerations.

After thorough research, Merchize decided to migrate its data using Amazon Web Services (AWS). With support from VTI, Merchize has achieved numerous business milestones, and their success story was selected by AWS to be featured on its website as a successful example.

• Supports 1 to 3 million website visitors per month with a latency of 100 milliseconds
• Utilizes a flexible pricing model, optimizing costs effectively
• Demonstrates high availability, ensuring continuous system operation 24/7
• Manages cloud infrastructure with only three personnel

Continuously support infrastructure optimization

In 2020, Merchize migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from another cloud computing provider. “We were introduced to AWS by some partners in the industry who indicated that it could provide better service quality and cost support policies,” said Mr. Nguyen Duc Tung – CEO of Merchize. “Optimizing technology infrastructure costs has helped maximize profits and reduce costs for our customers.” Merchize charges fees based on the services selected by customers, starting from only $6.99, and the company strives to keep costs at a minimum to reach a maximum number of eCommerce retailers.

AWS introduced VTI, a technology company in Vietnam and an advanced consulting partner of AWS. VTI supported Merchize in planning and successfully executing the transition to AWS within the planned 6-month project timeline.

Merchize also benefited from AWS’s strategic support. “We are truly impressed by the support from solution architects, experts, AWS solution managers, and VTI. They worked directly with us to ensure the smoothest transition and our architecture team was efficiently built from scratch,” shared Mr. Tung.

Approach by phase, ensuring smooth infrastructure transition

Merchize executed the migration in phased stages. Initially, they migrated 100 e-commerce stores simultaneously, monitoring stability and performance before proceeding to the next clusters. They used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor activity logs and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store logs. Additionally, Amazon S3 was utilized to store 500-600 TB of customer and product data, with efficient database querying using Amazon Athena.

Before the migration, Merchize relied on Kubernetes to manage containers for the backend. As part of the migration process to AWS, Merchize began using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to automate coordination and provisioning. This allowed the setup of the Amazon EKS infrastructure to run on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) AWS Spot Instances, optimizing costs. The company currently runs over 80% of the workload on Amazon EC2, and depending on Merchize’s demand on AWS Spot Instances, they have achieved up to 70% monthly computing cost optimization. 

Prevent service interruptions on eCommerce sites

When Merchize set up its architecture using the Amazon EKS on Spot strategy, there were initially around 40 separate Microservices running on the Node Spot Instance. However, when businesses experience disruptions to Node operations, the availability of customer websites will be seriously affected. 

Supported by the high-quality personnel teams from AWS and VTI, Merchize’s engineers were able to set up a diversified approach. On each Node, two Pods were assigned — the main Pod on the Spot Instance and a backup Pod on the On-Demand Instance. This created a flexible architecture capable of maintaining high performance. In the event of a disruption to an AWS Spot Instance, the Node could switch the backup to an On-Demand Instance to ensure continuous system operation. Merchize also implemented Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to ensure the best availability during peak shopping times on customer websites.

Multi-AZ architecture supports stability and scalability

Running Merchize’s architecture in AWS’s Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) provides high availability for both Merchize and its customers. Merchize chose AWS US East (Ohio) as the primary AWS Cloud region, supporting the company’s expansion efforts in the United States. “With the deployment of Multi-AZ, we achieve an uptime of 99.99% and consistent speed on our customers’ websites,” said Mr. Tung.

AWS Services used by Merchize

Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) provides flexibility in provisioning, operating, and scaling the capacity of applications using Kubernetes.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances 

EC2 Spot Instances leverage excess EC2 capacity and can reduce costs by up to 90% compared to on-demand EC2 pricing. 

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a leading object storage service known for its flexibility, scalability, security, and high data availability in the market.

Amazon Athena

Athena is an interactive query service that uses standard SQL to analyze data on Amazon S3. 

Benefits AWS Brings to Merchize

• Ensure 99.99% high availability and fault-tolerant architecture
• Reduce monthly compute costs by 70% with AWS Spot Instance
• Cut overall infrastructure costs by 43%
• Optimize costs with multi-tenant deployments
• Receive dedicated support from technology experts
• Migrated thousands of eCommerce stores within 6 months
• Store 500-600 TB of log and customer data. 

Mr. Nguyen Duc Tung, highlights the immediate effectiveness of transitioning to AWS cloud platforms, stating, “Since migrating to AWS and utilizing AWS Spot Instances, we have optimized infrastructure costs by up to 43%. We have seen significant optimization in computing costs, and we expect future costs to be even more optimized.” In particular, the entire conversion process to AWS only took 6 months according to the project schedule, with the planning and implementation support of VTI. Merchize is experiencing approximately 20% annual growth and is confident in its ability to scale the system to accommodate an increasing number of customers.

See more: VTI supported Merchize in executing the transition to AWS

Conclusion

Merchize has completed the transition to AWS and is continually enhancing its operational efficiency based on the advantages of its AWS Cloud infrastructure. The company sought insights from AWS and VTI to migrate its platform to a multi-tenant environment rather than a single-tenant one. After completing the optimization process, Merchize plans to expand its data and analytics on AWS to better serve customers both domestically and internationally.

VTI believes that AWS is the perfect platform to meet the digital transformation needs of businesses. Recognized as an advanced consulting partner of AWS in Vietnam, VTI’s mission is to bring the power of the cloud to organizations, accelerating their time to value and achieving significant business impact.

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