VMEngine and AWS Help Yeppon to 40% Savings and 30% Faster Web Performance

When Yeppon was launched by three friends in 2011 it mostly offering electronics, but it now sells products in 150 different categories. It has built its service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since its inception. “What’s great about AWS is that you can just start building even with minimal experience—it’s very user friendly and you can get set up very quickly,” says Luca Marantelli, chief technology officer at Yeppon. Over time Marantelli’s team realized it wasn’t making the best use of its AWS services—or taking advantage of new ones. As developers, rather than infrastructure experts, Yeppon needed some help. “VMEngine looked at the complete system stack to find ways to improve performance and increase efficiency,” says Marantelli.

The team wanted to migrate its website to more modern AWS services to improve scalability and stability to support its rapid expansion. In common with many ecommerce sites, Yeppon sees wide fluctuations in demand. At the busiest times, website performance for customers could suffer. In addition, it had poor visibility into its cloud spending, which made cost control challenging. The company also wanted to strengthen its security posture because it had been hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Yeppon wanted a more granular approach to permissions and identity management than it had needed as a smaller startup.

Yeppon began working with VMEngine on a wide-ranging project to modernize its backend systems. Over the years, the company’s website has grown in complexity with different components relying on different AWS services. Fundamentally the service wasn’t making the best use of core building blocks like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). VMEngine reduced the number of instances Yeppon needed to run its core applications. The next step was to migrate the core computing tasks for the site from Amazon EC2 to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which allowed for even more efficient utilization, deployment, and management of instances. “VMEngine just works really tightly with us,” says Marantelli. “They have a great overview of all our systems and leave us to focus on the applications and developing new features for customers. They’ve offered a great service from the initial migration to the current ongoing management.”

Previously, Yeppon managed content delivery manually but it now uses Amazon CloudFront for secure delivery with minimal latency and automated scaling. Amazon CloudFront also allows it to easily create rules to manage caching resources to improve site performance and make more efficient use of resources. Yeppon also uses the service to create rules to detect and prevent bot attacks. To make the website more resilient against cyberattacks, Yeppon now uses AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) to protect against common attacks and strengthen and automate security capabilities. VMEngine also set up Application Load Balancer to create rules to block common attack patterns while also streamlining traffic.

Running API libraries on AWS Elastic Beanstalk along with updating APIs in use has further improved performance and security and made it easier to deploy new versions of web applications. The service means Yeppon can enable balancing for its APIs and define rules to provide better scalability. It uses AWS CodePipeline for streamlined continuous delivery pipelines and to build container images that can be easily replicated. Previously Yeppon published updates manually, which meant that there was a high possibility of mistakes. AWS CodePipeline automates every stage of the code release process to eliminate manual processes and the potential to introduce errors. “The great thing about working with Yeppon is that development never stops—there are always new challenges for us to meet,” says Clara Russo Guarro, cloud solution architect at VMEngine.