AllSaints: Enhancing Online Retail Experience and Reducing Costs with Google Cloud

AllSaints is a global fashion retailer that has grown from a single store off London’s Carnaby Street to a major global brand for menswear, womenswear, and accessories in more than 27 countries worldwide. Founded in 1994, AllSaints is a truly global brand, as popular in East Asia as it is in Europe or North America. Now in its 25th year, the fashion retailer shows no signs of slowing down, setting new internal records with its revenue growth. Online sales are one of the biggest contributors to that success, and with more than two million visits per month to the AllSaints website, delivering a smooth, fast online experience is a key challenge for the company.

AllSaints, a global fashion retailer, faced a significant challenge in managing its online sales platform. With over two million visits per month to the AllSaints website, delivering a smooth, fast online experience was crucial. However, predicting sales during peak demand periods was difficult, and the need for infrastructure often doubled during these times. The company had to maintain more than 60 servers to meet peak demand, but almost half of these were idle outside of peak periods, making the solution expensive. Additionally, installing additional capacity was a slow process, delaying structural changes such as expansion into new territories or the deployment of new features. As an established luxury brand, AllSaints knew that its customers valued consistency and a seamless online experience. Shortfalls in infrastructure capacity compromised that consistency by causing site instability and degraded performance.

AllSaints decided to migrate to a cloud infrastructure to optimize the responsiveness and reliability of its retail operations. The company started by deploying Google Workspace for internal communications to get people used to cloud-based tools. It then began the switch to microservices and opted for Kubernetes in 2016, using a mixed environment comprised of Google Cloud and another cloud provider. However, the team soon realized that using Google Cloud alone would reduce costs while enhancing scalability. With support from Pythian, a global IT company and Google Cloud Premier Partner, AllSaints migrated all legacy from its split architecture over to Google Cloud. The migration was completed within a week. Now, AllSaints has halved the number of servers it runs from 60 to 30, relying on Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine autoscaling to meet the needs of additional traffic. By eliminating the need for additional servers to meet spillover, the company cut infrastructure costs by 50%, while improving performance during periods of peak demand.

• The migration to Google Cloud has brought significant operational benefits to AllSaints. The company now has a smoother, faster site experience for customers, which has helped to boost conversion rates. The move to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine also allowed the company to build a new CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins on Google Cloud and Terraform. This has cut the time it takes to deploy a change by more than 75%, from more than 20 minutes to less than five. The simplicity and speed of creating test environments in Google Cloud also means developers can test code on the same infrastructure that it will run on in production, minimizing the potential for problems. This improved CI/CD pipeline has made AllSaints more responsive to customer needs and more proactive.

• Deploys new code four times faster, in less than five minutes instead of more than 20

• Accelerates page-load speeds by up to 32% on retail website, even during traffic peaks

• Cuts infrastructure costs by 50%