McAfee Reduces Monthly Infrastructure Costs by over 40% by Modernizing Using Amazon DynamoDB

McAfee, a global leader in online protection, needed a reliable system to deliver tailored marketing campaign messages to its growing subscriber base of millions of subscribers. This system needed to be able to capture key metrics at scale that measure campaign performance. McAfee’s decision to modernize its legacy on-premises infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped McAfee achieve 40 percent savings in monthly infrastructure costs while reducing latency and improving operational efficiency.

McAfee creates consumer and business solutions that seek to make the world a safer place, and it wanted to make infrastructure changes to provide better service to its consumers. To meet resiliency requirements due to increased demand, the company needed to modernize the legacy commercial database that handled its marketing automation application. This application drives message delivery with personalized content for hundreds of millions of impressions each month. McAfee determined that it needed to modernize the application’s database on AWS because the application’s database would require more horizontal scaling than its current legacy commercial database could offer. “Our diagnosis was that the database needed to be upgraded, preferably to a NoSQL database,” says Deepak Thakral, vice president of consumer ecommerce at McAfee.

A NoSQL database would offer greater scalability than the company’s current solution. Additionally, migrating from on-premises data centers to a cloud-based infrastructure would offer better resiliency and uptime. “I’ve worked in multiple organizations that have used AWS, and I’ve found it to be better at meeting needs than other providers,” says Thakral. “Migrating to AWS was the clear choice.”

The migration happened in stages. In the first stage, McAfee migrated its current data stores to the cloud to increase resiliency as well as uptime. The second stage involved migrating from a relational database management system to Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. Using Amazon DynamoDB gave McAfee the horizontal scalability it needs for its applications. And using Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling dynamically adjusts provisioned throughput capacity on behalf of the application in response to actual traffic patterns—meaning that McAfee doesn’t pay for unused provisioned capacity. “The scaling aspect is very important, as well as the number of reads and writes that we’re making and the throughput we’re expecting in terms of response times,” says Thakral. “Our current system scales to handle eight billion read operations per month and two billion write operations per month.” As a result of the increased scalability and performance, the company continues to reach its millions of subscribers and scale to handle the double-digit year-over-year growth in its subscription base. Additionally, McAfee has realized a 40 percent savings in monthly infrastructure costs. “Using Amazon DynamoDB provided us with the scalability to handle our growing subscription base while helping us to reduce infrastructure costs significantly,” Thakral says.

Using Amazon DynamoDB has also helped McAfee to reduce response times significantly. “A big benefit of using Amazon DynamoDB is that it helped us to bring down response times for calculating key performance indicators for campaign performance to milliseconds,” Thakral says. To further decrease response times and further lower the cost of read operations, McAfee is also evaluating the use of in-memory acceleration using Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for Amazon DynamoDB.

In addition to increased scalability, reduced latency, and decreased costs, using Amazon DynamoDB provides continual backups with global replication. The biggest benefit for the company, however, is the reliability of the database. “In 8 months, we have seen minimum issues in terms of database reliability and application scalability,” Thakral says. “As a result, our engineers can spend more time on developing and launching products rather than troubleshooting or managing hardware.” For monitoring the databases, McAfee uses Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers, and IT managers. “Using Amazon CloudWatch gives us the ability to monitor the critical metrics around response times and impression deliverability,” says Thakral. The company’s use of AWS managed services helps McAfee stay focused on business objectives. Additionally, the company has benefited significantly from technical support from AWS and hands-on guidance from the AWS Solutions Architecture team. “Our dedicated primary solutions architect from AWS has been our trusted adviser in this journey with guidance on technology and operational excellence,” says Thakral. “We can remain focused on running our business.”

McAfee’s success using AWS has encouraged the company to expand its cloud infrastructure to other areas in ecommerce. The company plans to migrate its customer dashboard, web store, shopping cart, and payment services to a cloud-native architecture on AWS to achieve low latency and global scale for its ecommerce operations. “Everything around the subscription business will be migrating to the cloud,” says Thakral. “That’s the place where, as a competitive ecommerce shop and cybersecurity shop, you want to be. And by using AWS, we really feel that we’re within striking distance of getting there.”