Wine-Searcher Uses AWS Control Tower to Centralize Governance and Optimize Compute for 20% Monthly Savings

Founded in 1999, Wine-Searcher provides “Wine/Spirits product and price information finding” services for customers and retailers. Boasting the world's largest database of wine and spirits, Wine-Searcher is the primary resource for product knowledge, events, and purchasing.

Operating a global business can mean governance, networking, security, and scalability challenges. With plans to launch a full suite of digital products on AWS, Wine-Searcher wanted to simplify its account management and environment while looking for ways to reduce costs without sacrificing performance, security, and reliability. This initiative would help them integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance user experience, search, and recommendations capabilities, resulting in better use of its massive amount of data.

To achieve their goals, Wine-Searcher needed to evaluate their entire cloud environment. By uncovering areas to centralize, optimize usage, increase security for better global connectivity, and incorporate AWS best practices, the company could define a scalable, cost-effective roadmap. 

Wine-searcher selected Peritos Solutions to create a strategy for transforming their current infrastructure using AWS tools, services, and best practices. Together, they defined four goals: centralize control over multiple AWS accounts, implement better cost management methods, increase security and scalability for site-to-site and inter-account communication, and integrate AWS best practices to stay optimized as they grow. 

Peritos’s plan started with developing a strong governance strategy for Wine-Searcher’s multiple accounts. To centralize governance for Wine-Searcher’s multi-account environment, Peritos used AWS Control Tower. This tool enables quick setup and management of AWS environments through predefined guardrails, automated account provisioning, and governance policies. It also helps e-commerce companies like Wine-Searcher comply with regulatory requirements by enforcing best practices and standards through preconfigured controls. The result was 50% less time spent managing account governance and security audits, reducing operational overhead on their internal DevOps and security teams.

With a strong governance stance in place, it was time to take a closer look at cloud optimization. Peritos used AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer to uncover areas where costs could be optimized. By analyzing peak-hour patterns, Peritos identified an opportunity to reduce monthly cloud spend with a more strategic approach to compute resources. Using real-time insights, Peritos recommended Wine-Searcher to employ Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Reserved Instances and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances for maximum cost efficiency, saving 20% per month

Next, Peritos moved to improving agility and security across environments. Peritos connected both Wine-Searcher’s multiple AWS accounts with their on-premises environments using a site-to-site VPN managed by AWS Transit Gateway. This centralized hub streamlines architecture for easier management, better visibility and control, and a more secure environment for Wine-Searcher’s global network. Wine-Searcher’s goal of releasing a digital suite of products is now easier to achieve, with a 40% reduction in network configuration effort that enables faster rollouts.  

The final piece in this transformation was a bi-annual AWS Well-Architected review that would identify any gaps in reliability, security, costs, and operational excellence. This also served as an ongoing assessment of Wine-Searcher’s environment, enabling implementation of best practices and expert guidance.  

“The AWS Well-Architect review usefully examined structures, and identified usage inconsistent with requirements,” says Paul Hangartner, CFO, Wine-Searcher.com. “When we try to optimize our configuration, the provider methodology constrains our process, limiting benefit gains. Investigating PoC projects, balances new cost saving opportunities and provider technology constraint. Ongoing optimization, maintaining a central governance structure, and incorporating AWS best practices, Wine-Searcher.com can accomplish its larger goals of reducing cost, providing digital products and allowing AI to be selected where appropriate

Looking ahead, Wine-Searcher has the tools, flexibility, and guidance through Peritos to tackle whatever challenges come its way. Wine-Searcher' centralized and cost-effective environment simplifies the process for team members, customers, and retailers to achieve their wine-finding goals without compromising performance or security. With a streamlined AWS setup built on best practices and the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Wine-Searcher can seamlessly integrate AI solutions to enhance user experience through improved product searches and personalized recommendations. By partnering with Peritos, Wine-Searcher gained expert guidance, proven strategies, and the expertise necessary to cost-effectively scale its cloud environment in alignment with its business objectives.