Merlin Cycles modernizes ecommerce platform cutting latency 50% on AWS with AWS Partner Zen

Merlin Cycles’ ecommerce platform faced performance bottlenecks, driving up costs, affecting reliability, and worsening customer experiences. With its physical servers, the infrastructure struggled to scale during peak sales periods like Black Friday. It led to expensive over provisioning, server outages, and database transaction failures. Neil Hamilton, IT manager at Merlin Cycles says, “Our
online channel supplies critical customer and product data and is central to
our commercial strategy—hence our infrastructure needed to change.”

The company wanted to transform platform performance by migrating to AWS; however, limited cloud skills internally elevated the risk of delays and complications during the project. As a result, Merlin Cycles sought a partner that could help scope the work, design a cloud-native architecture, and guide the platform’s migration and modernization. “We realized that we needed some support as developing
the necessary skills in-house would take too long,” states Hamilton.

To achieve its platform goals, Merlin Cycles chose AWS Partner Zen—a trusted provider that supplied Merlin Cycles’ leased-line connectivity and operated like an extension
of the retailer’s own IT team with its consistently high-quality support. Using its deep expertise in AWS architectures and migrations, Zen guided Merlin Cycles through the project’s multiple phases to ensure a fast, seamless transition.

Together, Merlin Cycles and Zen aligned the AWS environment with best practices through the AWS Well-Architected review. As part of the migration, Zen right-sized the infrastructure to optimize costs and transitioned Merlin Cycles to Amazon ElastiCache
for Redis to enhance in-memory performance. It also moved the platform to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL, with AWS Graviton Processors
for improved speed and reliability. Then using the AWS Database Migration Service
(AWS DMS), Zen maintain seamless data synchronization between the on-premises
and cloud-based infrastructure.

Merlin Cycles also migrated the platform’s full web stack—including PHP, Apache, Nginx, and Varnish workloads—to load-balanced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. “The cutover was very simple,” recalls Hamilton. “We had to point our website to the new AWS setup, where everything was already working on the data that was still being synchronized by the DMS. This was the part of the process we were most anxious about—but I needn’t have worried: it just worked.”

With its AWS modernized infrastructure, Merlin Cycles’ platform is more flexible, resilient, and higher performing—improving customer experiences and sales. The platform scales on-demand for peak shopping periods, availability is 20 percent higher, latency has halved, checkout processes are 40 percent faster with databases running on AWS Graviton Processors. “Customers are happier with website performance on AWS,
no longer reporting slow speeds, problems retaining sessions, and issues from our database,” comments Hamilton.

With the platform running on AWS, the company has increased efficiency and unlocked new business opportunities. Infrastructure costs have fallen 10 percent, management efficiency has increased by 20 percent, and the risk of performance issues has dropped by 40 percent. “We used to spend significant time on our database—but moving to AWS means those issues are in the past. If we want to try something, we just spin up a new Amazon EC2 instance at negligible cost. We have the ability to use more aggressive marketing strategies without worrying about whether our infrastructure will cope,” says Hamilton.