AO.com, When it's Time for a Change
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- Netherlands
Product
- Cloudflare
- Cloudflare Workers
- Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing
- Cloudflare Tiered Caching
- Cloudflare Load Balancing
Tech Stack
- AWS S3
- AWS ALB
- New Relic
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- E-Commerce
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Fleet Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
AO is the largest online-only electricals retailer in the UK. Their company’s purpose is to relentlessly strive for better ways to ensure their customers are happy. AO started in 2000 with a bet between their founder John Roberts and his friend, JR was insistent that there was a better way for people to buy white goods online that was rooted in the best possible outcome for the consumer. The result of this wager has evolved to the present day as AO, which supports over 3,000 employees in three countries, selling a wide range of electrical items and boasting the world’s best recycling plant in Europe.
The Challenge
In 2015, AO began their expansion into Germany and the Netherlands. While the logistical effort of delivering products in these new markets was a challenge, they also faced increased pressure to ensure that their website would perform optimally for customers in these regions. AO implemented a well known content delivery network (CDN) to improve site performance across all of their web domains, and to reduce their overall infrastructure costs. While the onboarding process and support was straightforward, it wasn’t until they began routing more traffic to the provider’s edge network that they started experiencing some new unforeseen challenges. They were hit with some very high unexpected charges as a result, and this made them question the overall investment return of this solution. They also experienced an outage around this time, and had issues getting their case sufficiently escalated. These events forced AO to begin exploring alternatives for a solution that would be more cost-effective and support over the long term.
The Solution
AO considered many other offerings before deciding on Cloudflare. Cloudflare offered a technically innovative platform that included security features like DDoS protection by default, and was less expensive, with no overage charges for seasonal spikes in bandwidth. AO primarily uses Cloudflare to improve the performance of their web and mobile properties. Faster websites translate to happier customers, and this is core to their mission. Cloudflare exceeded their performance expectations compared to their previous provider. Once they enabled Cloudflare with features such as Rocket Loader, they immediately saw a 1.7 second decrease in page load times across all of their sites. AO uses New Relic to track their apdex scoring, and immediately saw a 10% increase in the number of satisfied requests. Argo Smart Routing with Tiered Caching was also deployed, which allows Cloudflare to route traffic and requests across the fastest, and least congested network paths to their users. Tiered caching reduces the number of requests that hit their origins by leveraging Cloudflare’s Tier-1 data centers to serve requested content. AO also discovered that Cloudflare Workers could help ease the pain of migrating from their previous solution. Workers runs simple business logic that automatically converts these files so they can be stored in S3. If Workers weren’t employed, it would have meant significant code changes to their websites to handle these files in the required S3 format. Lastly, to ensure a highly resilient architecture across their sites they use Cloudflare load balancing in addition to AWS ALB. ALB supports their EC2 instances, while Cloudflare load balancing provides instant failover from AWS to their co-located provider in the event of an AWS outage.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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