Building a Cloud-First Mindset for Customers
As a European reseller that seeks to help its customers stay on the cutting edge of IT, Dustin itself adopted a cloud-first strategy in 2019. It turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to rearchitect the environment that its developers use to build IT solutions for customers. “We wanted to have the freedom to improve and innovate,” says Rob Spekschoor, web development manager at Dustin.
Before migrating to AWS, Dustin’s on-premises infrastructure always had to be ready for peak performance, even though the company’s business-to-business focus meant that it could reliably predict when traffic would be slow. Costs were high, resources sat idle during nights and weekends, and adjustments to the infrastructure could take days, which slowed development.
Freeing Developers to Innovate for Users
After the migration, almost all Dustin’s ecommerce workload now uses
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud. The workload runs 30 percent quicker, the online ordering process for users is streamlined, and backend transactions for employees are simplified. “It’s all nearly instantaneous,” says Spekschoor. “So the gain is huge.” Plus, Dustin cut its monthly costs by 50 percent, savings that it can pass along to its customers.
In all, Dustin uses 85 services from AWS. Developers are free to work autonomously on projects for customers without concern for infrastructure management. The company releases new services automatically and continuously instead of working in “sprints” every 2 weeks to release tools all at once. Developers now deploy projects as they finish them, from 10 to 20 a day. “We saw that people were fighting to be added to this project, because it’s cool,” says Spekschoor. “It’s new technology.”
The company worked with
AWS Training and Certification, which gives participants the opportunity to learn from AWS experts, advance skills and knowledge, and build futures on AWS. Each developer earned at least one certification, and more than 80 percent of employees earned more advanced certifications. Customers benefit from the developers’ expertise in writing and deploying cloud-based applications and knowledge of how to optimize cost and performance.
