Tag: Ecommerce

Learn how Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technology Officer of Felix Gray, an e-commerce startup, scaled their infrastructure and planned for massive traffic spikes using Amazon Aurora and Elasticache. He discusses best practices on how to scale your database with minimal downtime, find performance bottlenecks in your database driven application, and how to handle service failures gracefully. Houtan also provides real world examples of the challenges his team faced while scaling Felix Gray, and speaks to the common growing pains any tech startup will face as they scale in the cloud.

From unanticipated service failures to load-related performance degradations, infrastructure event readiness planning is critical for handling seasonal traffic spikes gracefully and dynamically. Without proper preparation, your best sales day could become your last. Gain insights into how Elaine Arbaugh, Senior Software Engineer and SRE tech lead, at fintech startup Affirm managed the massive influx of activity during the 2018 Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday shopping weekend by building a scale-up, fault tolerant, database system that was able to handle 5x a normal day’s scale.

While fashion is sometimes seen as rarified and impenetrable, the reality is that most people engage with it on a daily basis. After all, everyone has to put on an outfit each morning—and those clothes have to be chosen and purchased somewhere. In Europe, that place is often Zalando.

In 2009, Johannes Reck, a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, arrived in Beijing one day earlier than his friend and classmate, Tao Tao. Tao, who knew Beijing well, was able to serve as a local guide to Reck once he arrived, and the trip was a success. Without Tao, however, Reck found himself at a loss as to where to go or what to do.

At END. we’re constantly working to improve the way our engineering department operates. Our goal is simple: to empower the team so they can get stuff done without obstruction or interference. Anything to make things easier, faster, more reliable—and if that means tinkering with some new technology along the way, even better. Until recently, deployments were one of the biggest pain points for our engineers and with a two-person DevOps team we inevitably became a massive bottleneck when it came to go-live. We knew we needed to find a better way of doing things, and as existing AWS users, AWS Fargate seemed like the natural way forward.

At face value, Dollar Shave Club looks like a fairly simple service. Users come to the site and are able to search through various grooming products, such as shower gels, toothpastes, or, of course, razors. The simplicity and ease of navigation is no mistake, however, with the DSC engineering team focusing heavily on creating a seamless user experience that showcases the company’s affordable products.

Cyber Monday generates big sales for online retailers but it also generates big insights. As customers browse, retailers gain all kinds of new information about customer behavior and how the experience on their websites attracts—or repels—potential buyers. This is where experience analytics startup Clicktale comes in.

For shoppers who buy a mattress from Casper, all they have to do is hit the “place order” button and a few days later, a mattress shows up on their doorstep. Easy. But for Site Reliability Engineer John Spencer and the rest of his extended team, getting a mattress from order to delivery is a far more complicated process.

AfterShip is a SaaS solution that helps online retailers keep track of all their packages in one place.

From the beginning, the Glossier team set out to build a great technology company. Creating a beauty brand was of course also necessary, but that almost seemed like table stakes, per Bryan Mahoney, Glossier’s Chief Technology Officer.