Architecting a more reliable and scalable web infrastructure on AWS for Absolute Dogs

Absolute Dogs believe that the best way to train our beloved dogs is through games. They design and deliver training courses, which customers can purchase and download from their website.

Who are Absolute Dogs?

Absolute Dogs' are an online dog training company. Their business model involves product launches which bring spikes in traffic to the website, and as their business grew, their website infrastructure could not sufficiently scale to meet increasing demand for these launches. This meant the website would sometimes go down or run too slowly, affecting customer experience and sales. 

Absolute Dogs, with their partner Plume, approached the AWS Partners team and AWS recommended Cloudsoft to them. 

What did we do for Absolute Dogs?

Cloudsoft created a new website infrastructure on AWS for Absolute Dogs, both a learning management system (LMS) and an e-commerce site. 

The new website infrastructure includes:

• EC2 instances in an auto-scaling group;
• AWS Aurora RDS database;
• Application load balancer;
• S3 bucket for serving static assets;
• EFS (Elastic File System);
• High availability infrastructure split across availability zones.

This new infrastructure has greater embedded scalability so that the new site can automatically scale to meet peak demand during launch events, and the team are also able to manually scale if needed. 

For reliability, the infrastructure is also split across different AWS Availability Zones. Architecting in this way ensures that the Absolute Dogs site remains available if the underlying AWS infrastructure was affected by problems such as  power outages, freak weather events, and more. 

All of the infrastructure is described as code using Terraform, which means that it can be repeatably deployed and used to create a replica staging environment. This allows new infrastructure changes to be tested, and allows Plume and Absolute Dogs  to test new site code and new versions of the website before it goes live. 

The benefits

Absolute Dogs now have a much more scalable, reliable and repeatable infrastructure, which provides a more stable experience for customers. 

The website is now set to meet increasing demand during launches, and the auto-scaling set up means that Absolute Dogs’ costs are also better optimised as they only pay for peak load when peak load is consumed. 

"We’re really pleased with the results of our work with Cloudsoft. The team’s deep AWS expertise was clear from the outset, and they took time to understand our requirements and business and then translated them into a new infrastructure which meets those requirements."

Every product launch since the project went live has been a success. We would highly recommend working with Cloudsoft, and look forward to working with them again on future projects

• Mat Rouse, Absolute Dogs.

Migrate, manage and optimise your public cloud with Cloudsoft Tempo.