Nykaa Enhances its Beauty and Wellness Platform with Improved Security and Scalability Using AWS Enterprise Support

Consumers in India increasingly turn to Nykaa to shop for authentic beauty and fashion brands online. Marketed as a beauty and wellness platform with a difference, Nykaa offers comprehensive content such as how-to videos and product reviews. The company is committed to connecting with customers in a meaningful way, and its success has led to continued growth since its founding in 2012.

Nykaa was born on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, and relies on services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to deliver a seamless customer experience at scale. 

Like most online retailers, Nykaa experiences extreme spikes in traffic during peak shopping events such its annual Hot Pink Sale. As the business recorded 110% growth in revenue from 2019 to 2020, and with aggressive growth targets on the horizon, Nykaa sought technical support to review and optimize its cloud architecture. It also looked to bolster security ahead of its initial public offering in 2021.

Nykaa engaged AWS Enterprise Support in January 2021, starting with an in-depth architecture review. “We learned about the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. These helped us to leverage various parameters on the cloud to ensure every application we’re building is reliable, secure, and delivers a superior user experience,” says Lokesh Bais, director of engineering at Nykaa. 

To improve reliability during traffic spikes, the AWS Enterprise Support team recommended Amazon ECS capacity providers to help Nykaa’s engineers with cluster management and container provisioning. The team also suggested Amazon RDS Multi-AZ architecture to improve fault tolerance. Automation of data protection, security alerts, and disaster recovery was achieved by incorporating AWS Backup and AWS Security Hub. Finally, the Enterprise Support team recommended Nykaa to migrate critical workloads from Amazon RDS to Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed serverless database designed to run high-performance applications at scale. 

These modifications have helped to eliminate manual tasks such as creating data pipelines and restoring data. Nykaa has decreased its recovery time objective (RTO) from 14 hours to 3 hours. Bais comments, “We’re saving a lot of time because backups are a one-click job on AWS.” 

To better prepare for big shopping holidays, Nykaa worked closely with AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM). This feature of AWS Enterprise Support includes a specialized team providing guidance and operational support before and during major events. The IEM team helped with designing a detailed checklist to ensure the site’s backend infrastructure was prepared for rapid scaling on banner shopping days. The team also supported Nykaa during event execution to identify and quickly resolve issues before it could impact the user experience. This resulted in zero downtime or performance issues during Nykaa’s annual Hot Pink Sale. 

Cost optimization was another factor driving Nykaa’s decision to use AWS Enterprise Support. Since enlisting the Enterprise Support team, the company has reduced infrastructure costs by $500,000. “We’ve implemented new features in our application and still managed to pay less thanks to a more cost-effective architecture design,” Bais says.