ShareASale Migrates to AWS in 4 Months to Boost Scalability and Performance

Awin, a global affiliate platform, acquired ShareASale in 2017 in one of North America’s largest affiliate marketing networks, which connects businesses with resources that promote their products and services to their online audiences, such as websites, mass media houses, and influencers.

ShareASale’s traffic doubles or triples during Black Friday and Cyber Week, but its on-premises data center was cumbersome to scale. Getting new hardware took as long as 8 months, not including setup time. Any changes to the environment required back-and-forth communication with the third-party hosting provider. Repeated problems with communications and support teams delayed and added costs to the database migration ShareASale had been working on since 2018. The 26.4 percent increase in global retail ecommerce in 2020 exacerbated those issues. “The provider was slow or nonresponsive to changes that we needed to make,” says Ray Watters, senior systems engineer at ShareASale. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, our business went through the roof, and getting new machines and resources provisioned was nearly impossible.”

In early 2022, ShareASale decided to migrate to AWS so it could virtualize and self-manage its environment and align with Awin, which ran some infrastructure on AWS. To facilitate a rapid migration before Black Friday in November, AWS recommended IT consulting firm Prime TSR, an AWS Partner with expertise in cloud migration, as local support for ShareASale.

The migration took 4 months. In March 2022, ShareASale and Prime TSR began designing an outcome-driven migration plan using AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program. Prime TSR also made heavy use of AWS Application Migration Service, which automates the conversion of customers’ source servers to run natively on AWS, for the bulk of ShareASale’s server-to-EC2 migrations. The migration kicked off in June with a cutover date of September 23. The process went smoothly; there was zero cutover downtime. “We are very sensitive to downtime in real-time applications, and the cutover was effectively seamless for those mission-critical systems,” says Steven Leve, principal architect at ShareASale.

Prime TSR was key in building a custom solution for ShareASale’s rapid migration. “Almost no one on our engineering team had managed an entire AWS environment,” says Todd Weaver, technology director at ShareASale. “Prime TSR brought the AWS expertise and confidence to help us understand the migration and operations.”

ShareASale rehosted its on-premises SQL database servers to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. It also lifted and shifted its VMware servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Using Amazon EC2, ShareASale has reduced technical debt. Instead of using four big on-premises servers with lots of RAM and central processing power plus two overloaded SQL machines, it now supports the web application on four Amazon EC2 instances and uses only one Amazon RDS instance. “The servers are working so much better and have so much more capacity. They can handle the load that our physical boxes just couldn’t,” says Watters.

The company can spin up a server manually on AWS in minutes, whereas previously doing so took hours. With that elasticity and scalability, ShareASale can provide customers with high performance and virtually no outages, even in peak traffic times such as Black Friday and Cyber Week. It’s also prepared for unexpected bumps in traffic. When traffic spiked to Black Friday levels on Singles’ Day, a holiday on November 11 that originated in China and is now growing in popularity worldwide, ShareASale provided high availability for customers. “We contacted AWS, which quickly freed up some resources, and everything leveled out,” says Watters. “When Black Friday came along, those settings were already in place. We didn’t have to do anything.”

ShareASale can resolve infrastructure issues faster on AWS because it has better support and greater visibility into the environment. An outage on ShareASale’s on-premises data center used to mean that Watters would have to spend up to 12 hours on the phone with the former hosting provider. On AWS, the ShareASale team can open a support window that shows every issue in the data center and how to fix them. “AWS provides a collaborative support effort we didn’t have before,” says Weaver. “If there’s an issue, we can work with someone very quickly to have it resolved.”
 

On AWS, ShareASale provides a high-performing affiliate marketing solution that customers can use to boost sales during the holiday shopping season and beyond.

By rehosting its original database to AWS, ShareASale has greater control over its environment. “Greater control is the most important win from the migration,” says Leve. “On AWS, we have the stability and support to modernize, evolve, and grow. This clears a path to improving organizational agility and the developer experience, reducing time to market and maintenance cost, and decreasing defect rate.” The company plans to enhance the customer experience further by taking advantage of more AWS services and exploring serverless architecture and containerization.

The company particularly wants to use AWS to align its infrastructure with Awin to increase connectivity. This will help these organizations serve customers more seamlessly on a global scale. Weaver says, “We’re aiming to develop in a common mentality by using the same AWS infrastructure and technologies to become more tightly integrated with Awin and share data more broadly across platforms.”