Value acceleration for istyle with AWS Cloud Economics analysis
After identifying the potential for a 40 percent reduction in infrastructure costs and a 30 percent improvement in staff productivity, istyle decided to expand its AWS relationship and make 1,000 virtual machines and 120 services fully cloud-based
2022
istyle has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its e-commerce operations website "@cosme". The journey started when istyle, already an AWS customer, wanted to migrate additional workloads to the cloud due to limitations of its on-premises environment. However, it was concerned about the potential increase in costs. istyle engaged the AWS Cloud Economics team to help optimize its existing environment, realizing a 10 percent reduction in current run costs, which also led to improvements in performance, by implementing the action plan the AWS team presented. This was followed by a business case that confirmed its decision to migrate its remaining on-premises workloads to the cloud. The ability to realize cost savings quickly, and seeing the additional savings possible as outlined in the business case, enabled istyle to become comfortable with the migration plan and go ‘all in’ on AWS!
We received detailed figures from the AWS Cloud Economics team, and these figures matched actual realized benefits. AWS is a reliable partner, with the added attraction of its generous support. I would like to tackle new challenges while learning from the expertise of professionals.
Shuntaro Kondo T&C Development Center Director and Vice President of Engineering, istyle, Inc.
Improving reliability and reducing high system load for one of Japan's largest beauty and cosmetics sites
istyle was established in 1999 to create a database of consumer information on cosmetics and support corporate marketing activities. The company launched the comprehensive cosmetics and beauty website "@cosme", which provides word-of-mouth reviews and blogs. Currently, istyle not only offers information on cosmetics and beauty, but also operates the official mail order shopping service "@cosme SHOPPING" and the brick-and-mortar retail outlet "@cosme STORE".
The "@cosme" site is characterized by advanced search capabilities, including the ability to select the best cosmetic and beauty products for a given user while allowing them to view currently popular products in a ranked format and purchase products that strike their fancy. Users can search for user reviews written, both good and bad, and filter results based on conditions such as only from those in a similar age range and skin type. With over 7 million registered members and information on over 400,000 products, "@cosme" is regarded as one of the largest comprehensive cosmetics and beauty websites in Japan.
“We offer services with a focus on how to meet the expectations of users and brands participating in "@cosme" and how to best support our business. Utilizing cutting-edge IT on the backend, we always strive to provide services that are easy for users to use,” said Shuntaro Kondo, istyle Inc., T&C Development Center Director and Vice President of Engineering.
"@cosme" has grown steadily since its launch. istyle’s special e-commerce event "@cosme BEAUTY DAY", for instance, began three years ago and sells limited edition items and pre-order sales. The event has become very popular, and access volumes have spiked each time the event was held. With the number of site visits increasing rapidly, cases of service interruption have become more frequent. Istyle has also increased the frequency in holding advance and exclusive sales promotions in collaboration with cosmetics brands and other product manufacturers, making it necessary to deal with a volume of users during such events.
istyle turned to AWS to help reduce costs and increase agility and performance to handle seasonal spikes in demand. First, istyle decided to use AWS to migrate its e-commerce site. Utilizing the cloud allows spikes in access volume to be handled without any problems. However, the on-premises, backend system was still heavily loaded at the time, creating a need for a more scalable and reliable solution. The company therefore quickly recognized the need for a full cloud computing solution.
AWS Cloud Economics opens the path to full cloud computing
Initially, istyle conducted its own in-house calculation of the costs that would be required to migrate the system fully to the cloud with AWS. However, the numbers did not fit its budget and migration stalled.
“AWS is flexible, easy to use, and is able to handle drastic peaks, with plenty of leeway. A full cloud-based system was ideal, but our internal estimates showed it to be quite expensive. The AWS Cloud Economics team showed us a detailed estimate of the benefits of optimizing the cost of the existing cloud environment, as well as the expected reduction in costs and improvement in productivity after migrating the additional on-premises environment to AWS. We therefore felt we could implement full cloud computing as long as we could plan on optimizing the cost of all IT assets,” recalls Shinya Matsuda, istyle Inc., T&C Development Center Assistant Director and CTO.
First, the AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) team analyzed the existing environment in operation. The team found room for efficiencies and that costs could be quickly reduced by making simple changes, such as migrating to
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) gp3 instances and expanding the coverage of reserved instances and savings plans. In addition to quick measures, AWS presented a concrete action plan that could be tackled in stages.
Once istyle started executing the plan, it was able to realize 10 percent savings within 1 month. Currently, the company is continuing cost optimization activities according to the action plan, confirming that the estimated benefits it was presented with are being fully realized.
The AWS Cloud Economics analysis was the catalyst for full migration. The AWS Business Value team (also part of Cloud Economics) calculated in detail the cost of infrastructure and gains in operational efficiency and productivity when migrating an on-premises environment to AWS. The resulting business case found that migrating with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) could be expected to reduce costs by about 40 percent, and improve staff productivity by 30 percent, compared to its current on-premises costs.
"It's very difficult to estimate the cost by hand. You can only do simple calculations, and you can only get vague and superficial results. However, the AWS report was highly detailed. It gave us peace of mind because it showed the benefits of migration using concrete figures,” says Matsuda.
Creating new, innovative and easy-to-use services
Through actively leveraging cloud technology, the staff at istyle are broadening their capabilities by learning AWS with a mix of training and hands-on experience, boosting the understanding of their environment. Using AWS is attractive because it accelerates the business and secures platforms. Users highly praise it for making it easier to tackle challenges and reform the business.
“AWS has been kind enough to support us while we work on our transformation. Even before introducing the new system, they were very generous and continue to provide their support now that operations have started. We have been very particular about in-house production from the beginning, but by working with professionals like AWS, we feel that we have an environment where we can focus on new challenges,” adds Kondo.
istyle believes that new initiatives will materialize by migrating to AWS. Kondo says that the most promising upside will be the ability to make bold changes according to need and market conditions, and expand the scope of the business in a short span of 1 to 2 years instead of 5 or 10 years. “With a variety of services and features available, we want to start actively leveraging AWS. I think the engineers will also be happy if we can start doing new things with AWS. We want to keep creating new and easy-to-use services by strengthening our development teams.”
Shuntaro Kondo, T&C Development Center Director and Vice President of Engineering, istyle Inc.
Shinya Matsuda, T&C Development Center Assistant Director and CTO, istyle Inc.
Customer Profile: istyle, Inc.
Established: July 1999
Capital: 4.756 billion JPY (as of end of June 2021)
Number of employees: 1009 (as of end of June 2021)
Business description: Planning and management of the comprehensive beauty portal site "@cosme" and providing related advertising services
Benefits after introducing AWS and future development
Rapid 10% reduction in costs through 'quick wins'
The potential for an additional 40% reduction in costs and 30% improvement in productivity by migrating the remaining on-premises environment to AWS
Cost optimization program completed in a 3-month time period. The potential for an additional 40% reduction in costs and 30% improvement in productivity by migrating the remaining on-premises environment to AWS
Key services currently in use
AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)
The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) was created to help companies in the process of migrating to the cloud benefit from the many business advantages of migrating their existing workload to Amazon Web Services. MAP was started to provide consultant support, training and service credits. It is intended to help mitigate the risks of migrating to the cloud, build a solid operational foundation, and reduce the initial cost of migration.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
