Patchworks Increases Customer Orders by 31% Using Amazon Aurora

Founded in 2014, Patchworks supports a virtually endless number of integrations because its Connecter Builder helps clients build any connector they require. Patchworks serves more than 400 clients, each with its own sales pipeline, across Europe, North America, and Asia–Pacific. The company exists in the middle of ecommerce storefronts and backend systems, filling gaps in increasingly complex IT infrastructures and helping with smooth order fulfillment. For example, Patchworks can send the online orders that it takes to mailing or stock systems. It also updates warehousing information and fulfillment status between third-party logistics systems and ecommerce storefronts.

As Patchworks advanced, it knew that expansion would help fulfill its long-term growth plans. In 2022, the Patchworks team decided to migrate to enterprise-grade solutions to run its system at scale and minimize downtime for its customers.

The team wanted to optimize its product and deliver a high-quality, consistent experience to its customers, but it had a tight timeline for the migration—it wanted everything to be completed before Black Friday. To accelerate the process, it enrolled in the AWS MAP Lite program for small to midsize businesses. “Our iPaaS infrastructure needs to be scalable and stable to handle millions of orders, guaranteeing uninterrupted and efficient operations,” says Conor Barr, chief technology officer at Patchworks. “AWS MAP Lite provided a seamless and quick migration.”

Had the team not been able to complete the migration before Black Friday, the project would have had to wait until February, when the busyness of the holiday shopping season had passed. Using AWS MAP Lite, the Patchworks team not only fast-tracked the migration process but also tested different AWS services and configurations so that it could find a good fit.

After 3 months of planning and testing, the Patchworks team quickly migrated its databases and infrastructure to Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system built for the cloud. “The database migration was pretty seamless,” says Andrew Downey, head of development at Patchworks. “The cutover took only a few seconds, with no issues.”

Using Aurora, the Patchworks team gained significant backend query speed. Response time went from 900 milliseconds on Patchworks’ previous system to 28 milliseconds on Aurora. Patchworks also gained the power to scale its database up and down according to demand. Before the migration, scaling up would have required a permanent database upgrade, even though the load would go back down after the busy season. Now, Patchworks benefits from a pay-as-you-go model. This new capability came in handy on Black Friday, when Patchworks successfully scaled to handle 24 million orders and scaled back down again afterward.

With its database migrated to Aurora and the holiday season deadline met, Patchworks turned its attention to migrating its Kubernetes clusters to AWS. To manage its clusters, Patchworks chose Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service, to run Kubernetes in the AWS Cloud and on-premises data centers. The team now has various node pools for logging, scheduling, and management and for securely running customer-entered code. “It’s easier to configure and easier to manage,” says Downey. “We can do a lot more using AWS.”

Along with the move to AWS, Patchworks has been busy launching its new product. The new version empowers customers to simply make more integrations with prebuilt or custom connectors and build new process flows without coding—both while improving reliability, availability, and speed. “Our customers are always our focus,” says Aaron Nesbitt, head of products at Patchworks. “We aim to achieve 100 percent of orders, all the time.” The Patchworks team can now better identify, solve, and prevent issues for its customers to avoid missing orders. Therefore, Patchworks has seen a year-over-year increase of 31 percent in customer orders, and its transactions have increased by eight million.

In June 2023, Patchworks’ exceptional work on its product earned it entry into the MACH Alliance (microservices, API-first, cloud-native software as a service, headless)—a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for excellent enterprise technology. This achievement shows that the Patchworks architecture meets a high standard. “It is a great achievement to be one of a few iPaaS systems in the Alliance,” says Barr.

As a fast-growing business, Patchworks plans to branch out into other regions around the world. The team will use more AWS services to accelerate its growth and further enhance the experience of its customers using generative artificial intelligence.

“Everything is scaling quite nicely for us,” says Downey. “We haven't encountered any boundaries within AWS; thus, we intend to continue our expansion.”