Leading home and fashion e-commerce player moves its data infrastructure to Microsoft Azure to handle seasonal surges in sales
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In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and people were spending more time at home, La Redoute experienced a sudden and significant uplift in sales. As transactions in its marketplace increased, the associated data grew exponentially putting pressure on the on-premises PostgreSQL databases already storing a large amount of data such as product prices, SKUs and sellers.
Already a user of Aiven for Apache Kafka for data streaming, La Redoute turned to Aiven to increase the scalability of its PostgreSQL databases. Diogo and his team moved the databases to the public cloud using Aiven for PostgreSQL, and also started using Aiven for OpenSearch to ingest and analyze all the logs generated by the PostgreSQL databases. La Redoute experienced an immediate increase in the scalability of its data infrastructure and was able to meet the unprecedented demand resulting from the pandemic.
The company embarked on the multi-faceted migration to Azure. For PostgreSQL, the La Redoute team initially planned to use Aiven tooling, allowing a one-click migration option across clouds and regions. However, as migrations are often used to rework some implementation details, the team took the opportunity to modernize the Terraform scripts used to define the previous cloud platform and upgrade PostgreSQL to the latest version. Due to these changes, the PostgreSQL migration was performed using the traditional setting of building the target infrastructure and then, after syncing the data, switching over.
“Most of our PostgreSQL migration time was spent doing automation, but once we got those sprints down, we had days where we moved 25 databases."
The rest of the migrations, such as Aiven for Kafka and Aiven for OpenSearch, were much simpler and faster. LaRedoute didn’t need any modifications so relied on the Aiven one-click migration tooling and Aiven team expertise to prepare, execute and monitor the transition.
Reflecting on the cloud migration, Diogo says: “Usually, if an organization decides to switch wholesale to a different hyperscaler, it creates all sorts of headaches. But migrating our Aiven services was seamless. The only hassle was on our side, with our code, and we restructured it. The fact that Aiven is cloud agnostic, and we can change clouds with one push of a button, is a huge win for us and saved us a lot of time.”
The Aiven Platform has enabled Diogo to extend the team’s capabilities to deliver more value to more parts of the business. Now Aiven supports all of La Redoute’s business domains from logistics and marketing to order and payment systems.
“The team used to have a traditional DBA mentality and was spending up to 90% of the day doing maintenance, patching and upgrades. That’s all handled by Aiven now, freeing up the team to focus on business projects and delivering solutions much faster. We can deploy databases in minutes rather than weeks,” says Diogo.
La Redoute is evaluating other Aiven services. Diogo says, “We’re exploring opportunities in the observability layer with Grafana and OpenSearch and on the database side with MySQL. We’re also really interested in the AI-driven optimization capabilities of EverSQL by Aiven, particularly if that extends to other Aiven solutions.”
