Prisync Case Study
2021
Prisync moved to an AWS cloud-based platform to help it handle spikes in customer numbers, offer richer competitor pricing insights, and focus on new product development. Sufle, a Turkey-based AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, helped Prisync through the entire project—from migrating its systems, to modernizing its applications, to providing training support for the DevOps team. Prisync is also using AWS Global Infrastructure Regions to expand and enter new markets around the world.
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“From the start, we never felt that this was an outsourced project—Sufle was simply an extension of our team and gave us a perfectly tailored framework of AWS services. What I liked the most was the dedication to really understand what we needed. We always felt safe in their hands.” — Samet Atdağ, CTO, Prisync.
Prisync Streamlines Cloud and Speeds Product Delivery Roadmap with Sufle on AWS
To stay ahead of the game in ecommerce, businesses need to keep abreast of online pricing changes and fast-moving market trends. Based in Turkey, Prisync uses a competitor price monitoring tool to take in new and constantly changing price information four times daily, providing an essential resource for its customers.
Following an explosion in the ecommerce market, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, Prisync was seeing large spikes in customer numbers. Its limited cloud platform was causing scaling and potential security issues. This left the company struggling to keep up and threatened its market position and ability to deliver new product features and services.
Prisync’s cloud provider offered a limited number of basic services, a costly price structure, and only a few local data centers. This was slowing Prisync down and making it much harder to meet customer needs and support its global growth ambitions.
The company also needed a more automated system to reduce the need for manual infrastructure and database management. And it wanted to reduce complexity—it had too many applications handling different, yet essential, tasks such as pricing collection, data processing, and user queries.
The Need for Speed
Prisync concluded that its options would be limited if it stayed with its cloud provider. To add new markets and retain the level of service needed to keep customers happy, it could have added other cloud providers. But that would have only increased complexity, leaving its systems fragmented and harder to manage.
“Speed is crucial in the domain of ecommerce analytics,” explains Samet Atdağ, CTO at Prisync. “We have to be able to meet our customers’ needs and keep improving our service on an increasingly regular basis. If we fail to keep up to date and provide new product features, our competitors will. We simply have to be as agile as possible to maintain our leading position in the global pricing software market.”
To help it meet these challenges, Prisync turned to AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Sufle to create an optimized and fully managed cloud infrastructure built on AWS. To construct the new architecture, Sufle consulted with all members of the IT team to ensure that everyone’s needs were met. It delivered the entire project in just five months.
“From the start, we never felt that this was an outsourced project—Sufle was simply an extension of our team and gave us a perfectly tailored framework of AWS services,” says Atdağ. “What I liked the most was the dedication to really understand what we needed. We always felt safe in their hands.”
A Tailored Solution
Sufle began by working closely with Prisync to understand its workloads and tailor a solution that would fit its requirements. After that, it was ready to migrate Prisync’s database and storage to AWS. The solution deployed modern containerized applications using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) — this means developers can now run the same applications in development and production, reducing maintenance. The company has also cut down time-to-market for new products and services, which can now be delivered in months or weeks rather than taking up to two years.
Now that Prisync has a fully managed cloud service for its database and applications, its customers can get even richer insights from its pricing data—for example, they can now view price trend information over time. Another benefit has been the ability to reduce query response times down to milliseconds. And, using the serverless and highly scalable Amazon DynamoDB (DynamoDB) database, Prisync can now make use of its 100 terabytes of historical data.
“With our old cloud provider, our historical data was very hard to use,” says Atdağ. “Now we can deliver valuable price trend information over time, helping our customers gain even more of a competitive edge.”
Smooth Operations and a 40% Cost Reduction
Sufle also helped Prisync to scale more easily using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances of its workloads, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in costs. “With AWS, we can fire up thousands of virtual machines over the five AWS Regions we use to pull in pricing information much faster,” says Atdağ. “When the job’s done, we can simply turn them off. It’s a hugely valuable resource.”
To ensure the new system would run smoothly, Sufle briefed the IT team at every stage of the implementation and worked to make sure the newly hired DevOps team would be ready to handle the system.
Since transitioning to AWS, Prisync has been able to redeploy its resources instead of having to expand its IT team. This has allowed it to develop new products and features and to grow its product development department. The market for IT engineers in Turkey is competitive, with many often working remotely, so keeping the on-premises DevOps team relatively small has helped the company to stay cost efficient.
“We now have a wider set of services to manage, though we’re doing it with a much smaller team—that’s a big saving in human intelligence,” adds Atdağ. “Now that the system is automated, it makes it much easier to spot issues and quickly resolve them too.”
High Availability
Thanks to the ability to deploy regional workloads with AWS, Prisync can now scale more easily when large numbers of new customers come on board—for example, a promotional campaign can lead to a significant new load on the system.
The high levels of system availability have also benefited Prisync. “Our customers need to track real-time pricing information at any given point of the day,” says Atdağ. “Any downtime risks us losing our customers, and that’s been virtually eliminated.”
He continues, “It’s now much easier to focus on our product roadmap. AWS has given us the speed we need and allowed us to almost double the number of new features we’re rolling out each quarter. Plus, we’ve been able to quickly enter new markets.”
Prisync plans to use more AWS managed services in the future and use the AWS network of global data centers to drive future growth. By deploying its cloud infrastructure on AWS, the company can now focus on innovative new products, such as premium services to help increase customer value overall.
“Building on AWS has been a great success story for the company,” concludes Atdağ. “With Sufle, we got up and running very quickly on the new system. Having someone on the ground gave us much more confidence in building a cloud platform that would truly future-proof our growth.”
About Prisync
Prisync helps ecommerce businesses optimize their business strategies by automating data collection of competitor pricing and providing smart suggestions. By being able to view competitor product pricing, Prisync’s customers can quickly see price changes in their market. This enables them to increase competitiveness, better calculate profit margins, respond to market changes, and increase profitability.
About Sufle
Sufle is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that specializes in cloud, DevOps/DevSecOps, software development, and compliance services. It helps businesses of all scales adapt, implement, and embrace next-gen tech practices through customized solution offerings, managed services, and training at every building block. Sufle brings years of experience and best practice together to enhance businesses.
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