Tapestry Builds a Scalable IaC Platform for Modernized Workloads Infrastructure Provisioning with Built-In Governance and Security

Tapestry is the parent company of three global luxury fashion brands: Coach, Kate Spade New York, and Stuart Weitzman. Originally Coach, Tapestry changed its name in 2017 to represent its broadening range of fashion brands. The following year, the company began its digital transformation, and it continues to work toward modernizing its legacy business applications in phases. By adopting the latest cloud and serverless technologies, Tapestry strives to improve its business agility and drive the most value for its customers.

Previously, Tapestry had built and provisioned infrastructure in the cloud manually, which was time consuming and prone to human error, with inconsistent environments and security and compliance risks. These challenges complicated Tapestry’s goal of optimizing its legacy applications. This process of manually provisioning infrastructure could take weeks to complete. To solve these issues, Tapestry started building the IaC-based platform in December 2021.

“Now that we’ve migrated to the cloud, we’re starting to transform our workloads,” says Rehan Mubashir, director and principal of cloud platform architecture and engineering at Tapestry. “We wanted to take an IaC approach to deploy our workloads securely and consistently.” Using AWS services alongside Terraform, Tapestry found streamlined and reliable solutions for its infrastructure provisioning and framework.

Tapestry first conducted a deep assessment of its use cases and created prevetted standardized architectural patterns establishing security, compliance, and alignment with AWS Well-Architected Framework, which teaches architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems in the cloud. These reference architectures can be readily used or tweaked to fit nearly any given use case. After establishing the standardized patterns to make the provisioning repeatable, consistent, inherently secure, and compliant, Tapestry created prevetted, parameterized IaC modules and IaC templates.The parameterization of the IaC modules facilitates the reuse of code for almost any use case without having to write the IaC code from scratch, saving time. Additionally, IaC templates make the provisioning process repeatable and consistent.

Tapestry now maintains a Terraform Enterprise (TFE) private module registry of around 80 modules and over 15 IaC templates, which, like the standardized reference architectures and IaC modules, are prevetted, cloud center of excellence (CCoE) aligned, and follow industry best practices. Next, to ensure governance, Tapestry established a standardized infrastrutcure provisioning workflow based on version control system (VCS) and Terraform pipelines, which incorporate approvals and are auditable. To support workloads with different levels of criticality, Tapestry built the platform to handle all disaster recovery tiers, along with high-availability or redundancy options as needed. And finally, to facilitate speed to market and postdeployment application lifecycle management, Tapestry also built various cloud-native pipelines.

In only a few months postbuilding, Tapestry was able to use the platform to successfully deploy 15 applications across multiple environments. The migration and success of Tapestry’s IaC platform was presented at AWS re:Invent 2022 (28:09).

With its IaC provisioning process and reference architectures in place, Tapestry has reduced the time it takes to provision infrastructure from weeks to days and reduced implementation times from days to hours. “The platform that we built has helped us to seamlessly deploy modernized workloads in a nimble, consistent, and repeatable manner, establishing security and governance,” says Mubashir. “All platform components work together as a single unit, turning it into an assembly line, which allows us to operate at scale and acts as an facilitator for digital transformation, making the entire provisioning process fast and seamless.”

Now, Tapestry staff can focus on innovating and developing new applications. “We are always adopting new technologies. We are excited about all the innovations coming from AWS, and we look forward to introducing more of those to the company,” says Mubashir.

By harnessing the advanced capabilities of the AWS cloud infrastructure and services, Tapestry has unlocked a world of possibilities. “This relationship propels our brands and customer experience to new heights,” says Diorio. “We also gain access to a rich suite of cutting-edge technologies that help us personalize interactions, optimize operations, and drive innovation across our brands.”

The next step in Tapestry’s digital transformation will include modernizing remaining legacy applications in the cloud using its IaC platform, working toward the goal of decommissioning its legacy environments. As Tapestry looks for new opportunities to innovate, the company will continue to rely on AWS services. “We have matured enough that we are now transforming the legacy applications to modernized cloud-native technologies,” says Mubashir. “We are excited to find new ways to benefit the business, test our ideas, and innovate on AWS.”