Case study: La Redoute takes control of cloud costs

Bring your own cloud strategy enhances scalability and improves load handling during peak trading events, such as Black Friday

La Redoute needed to migrate its data infrastructure from a leading cloud provider to Microsoft Azure for enhanced scalability and improved handling of peak loads during events, such as Black Friday.

Using a data migration platform from Aiven, the ecommerce retailer transitioned its open-source PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka and OpenSearch clusters to Azure. By embracing Aiven’s bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment model, La Redoute also substantially reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) for its Azure footprint.

Two centuries of reinvention

La Redoute was founded 186 years ago as a wool-spinning factory in France. It has grown into a leading ecommerce retailer in home, decoration and fashion as part of the Galeries Lafayette group. As a result, with over 10 million customers across 26 countries, digital innovation is key to its success. 

La Redoute's online marketplace features thousands of its products and others from over 800 brands, such as Adidas, Mango, and Monoprix. The company aims to provide customers with a superior digital experience and stay ahead by using data insights to deliver unmatched customer service.

However, in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and people spent more time at home, La Redoute experienced a sudden and significant uplift in sales. The data associated with this increased level of marketplace transactions grew exponentially, putting pressure on the retailer’s on-premises PostgreSQL databases, which already stored a large amount of data, such as product prices, stock-keeping units (SKUs), and sellers.

La Redoute already used Aiven for Apache Kafka data streaming, but it also wanted to increase the scalability of its PostgreSQL databases. So, Diogo Gomes, Head of Cloud Transformation at La Redoute, and his team moved the databases to the public cloud using Aiven for PostgreSQL. 

They also started using Aiven for OpenSearch to ingest and analyse all the logs generated by La Redoute’s PostgreSQL databases. The retailer experienced an immediate increase in the scalability of its data infrastructure, allowing it to meet the unprecedented demand resulting from the pandemic.

Moving to BYOC deployment

Soon after, in late 2022, La Redoute chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud provider so the company could be even more agile, responsive and scalable. It wanted to make it easier to handle the load peaks linked to major commercial events, such as sales periods, including Black Friday and Christmas. 

However, such an Azure migration is a complex and business-critical undertaking that typically takes months. The project also included migrating the company’s existing Aiven services and other databases and workloads running on its legacy cloud and on-premises environments for Gomes and the La Redoute teams.

When planning the switch to Microsoft Azure, Gomes and his team forecasted the increased costs associated with moving to a new cloud region. The plan led them to explore the Aiven BYOC model, which allows La Redoute to run Aiven services in its Azure account. Concluding that BYOC would enhance cost control and lead to overall cost reduction, it became La Redoute's preferred data infrastructure option.

Migrating cloud infrastructure 

The company embarked on a multifaceted Azure migration. For PostgreSQL, the La Redoute team initially planned to use Aiven tooling to allow a one-click migration across clouds and regions. However, as migrations often involve reworking some implementation details, the team took the opportunity to modernise the Terraform scripts used to define the previous cloud platform and perform a PostgreSQL upgrade. 

Due to these changes, the PostgreSQL migration was performed using the traditional setting of building the target infrastructure and then switching over after syncing the data. “Most of our PostgreSQL migration time was spent doing automation,” Gomes commented. “But once we got those sprints down, we had days where we moved 25 databases.”

The rest of the migrations, such as Aiven for Kafka and OpenSearch, were more straightforward and faster. La Redoute didn’t need to modify anything, so it relied on Aiven’s one-click migration tooling and the expertise of the Aiven team to prepare, execute, and monitor the transition.

Reflecting on the cloud migration, Gomes said: “Usually, if an organisation decides to switch wholesale to a different hyperscaler, it creates all sorts of headaches. But migrating our Aiven services was seamless. The only hassle was on our side with our code, and we restructured it. The fact that Aiven is cloud agnostic, and we can change clouds with one push of a button, is a huge win for us and saved us a lot of time.”

Reduced TCO and improved security 

The BYOC model has enabled La Redoute to reduce the TCO of the Azure cloud infrastructure related to its Aiven services. The retailer has achieved this through cost savings plans, committed use discounts, and other Microsoft billing and pricing features.

“By moving to BYOC, we gained control of our cloud costs. We brought the additional cost of moving from a 40% increase down to 14%. Given the shift to new, more expensive Azure regions, this was entirely acceptable to the business,” explained Gomes. 

“We then launched internal initiatives within the DBA [database assurance] team to reduce this increase to a net positive in savings, with one example being the automated shutdown of nonproduction databases out of working hours.”

Another key BYOC deployment benefit has been helping La Redoute meet regulatory and compliance requirements, such as GDPR. He continued: “Our security team likes the Aiven BYOC model, and because the whole database infrastructure—including customer data—is now on our tenant, it’s more easily managed and tightly controlled.”

Faster strategic time to value 

The Aiven Platform has enabled La Redoute to extend the capabilities of its IT team, allowing it to deliver greater value to more parts of the business. Aiven now also supports La Redoute’s business domains, from logistics and marketing to order and payment systems.

“The team used to have a traditional DBA mentality and spent up to 90% of the day doing maintenance, [on] patching and upgrades. That’s all handled by Aiven now, freeing up the team to focus on business projects and deliver solutions much faster. We can deploy databases in minutes rather than weeks,” Gomes said.

La Redoute is now evaluating other Aiven services. Gomes added: “We’re exploring opportunities in the observability layer with Grafana and OpenSearch, as well as MySQL for databases. We’re also really interested in Aiven's AI [artificial intelligence] driven optimisation capabilities of EverSQL, particularly if those capabilities extend to other Aiven solutions.”

Looking to the future

La Redoute plans to standardise its digital operations across countries to improve efficiencies and facilitate the rollout of new systems. 

“We need to build unifying systems that every country can use, which will enable us to respond to business needs in a faster and more agile way. A lot of these systems will use the Aiven Platform,” Gomes said.

João Granja, chief technology officer at La Redoute, echoed Gomes’s sentiment. “Our commitment to Aiven is more than just a contractual agreement,” he commented. 

“It’s a partnership that’s built on trust. Aiven has had a transformative impact on our company, and we’re excited to see our partnership's contribution to La Redoute’s success in the next few years.”

Harnessing the latest benefits 

La Redoute has continued to drive further efficiencies from its cloud migration work and use of Aiven. Gomes told RetailTechnology.co.uk that the retailer continues improving progressively thanks to its shift to general cloud-native environments.

“Leveraging Aiven's as-a-service is a big part of that,” he said. “We have now moved all of our PostgreSQL and Kafka workloads and have even started moving more into the ecosystem by testing Valkey, OpenSearch and MySQL services.” 

Gomes outlined the main benefits of this latest work: scalability, automation, and the platform's user-friendliness. Commenting on each area of benefits in turn, Gomes commented: “It's easy to scale the services to our needs, allowing us to make adaptations on the fly once we move the workloads from on-prem to better suit our needs; this has been instrumental to having consistent migrations and smoother post-migration periods.”

He continued: “By adopting an infrastructure-as-a-code [IaC] approach as much as possible, we've leveraged automation, allowing our teams to be quicker to deploy any services that the company needs and heavily customise scheduled downtimes to achieve significant cost savings.

“Aiven's platform is also simple to use, and its support teams are readily available. This makes our teams comfortable and confident in their daily work. A recent benefit we've been exploring is the Aiven AI tool DB Optimizer, which has enabled us to seamlessly receive optimisation suggestions that have improved our workload performance, efficiency, and reliability.”

Standardising operations globally

Explaining how these benefits have also helped La Redoute in its aim to standardise its digital operations across countries, Gomes said its ecommerce platform now receives an average of 36 million monthly visits worldwide. 

“The company is now present in some twenty countries around the world and made the strategic decision a year ago to strengthen its position in the home decoration market (which now represents 70% of total sales) and consolidate its international strategy to become one of Europe's leaders in home,” he said. 

To achieve this goal, La Redoute is implementing a global-local strategy that involves specific planned projects aligned with the company's vision. 

“As the IT team, we leverage principles and methodologies such as IaC to bring that standardisation across the different product platforms,” Gomes said. 

“By using automation, we are assured that all our services are deployed the same way, guaranteeing consistency across the board and making problem resolution much more straightforward. This ongoing effort has successfully industrialised many of our in-house practices, leading to a higher project delivery rate.”

Continued delivery of success

As a result of its post-COVID cloud migration work with Aiven, La Redoute has modernised most of its IT infrastructure to varying degrees of maturity. Gomes shared some of the most successful actions.

First, he cited cost savings. “Our newly formed FinOps department has driven several cost-saving initiatives, the most meaningful of which is using automation to create automatic shutdowns on all non-critical workloads during non-working hours,” he said. 

“Linked explicitly to Aiven, deploying through Azure Marketplace and using the BYOC model has enabled us to use our expenditures as part of our commitment with Microsoft and use Azure saving plans and reserved instances to enhance savings further.”

Gomes also referenced greater efficiency as a benefit. “Industrialising our practices enables us to deploy faster and cleaner,” he said. “This reduces time spent on maintenance and increases time spent on meaningful, value-added tasks and projects.”

Regarding platform usability, Gomes added: “The platform's ease of use, even when not using IaC, enables new team members to be onboarded more quickly. It also allows faster creation of POCs [proof of concepts], enhancing collaborative efforts among the different teams and allowing creativity to flow. 

“This helps the projects and tech stack improve over time and helps with motivation and talent retention in the long run. Aiven's teams and know-how, together with our in-house teams during the initial build stages, have also been invaluable in building better solutions.”

Self-managed strategy

Gomes also said that the additional level of observability and support La Redoute has through Aiven’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) now facilitated a welcome change for a team primarily focused on self-managed solutions, where they had to build everything from scratch. 

“In truth, initially, we were sceptical about how and if it would work at all, but I don't think anyone in the team expected how much of a game-changer this would be,” he stated. “You don't just deploy a database anymore; you deploy the database with high availability built in, disaster recovery set from the get-go, and a basic but robust monitoring layer added on top with zero effort on our team side. 

“Adding to that, Aiven's diligence in applying best practices so the systems run smoother and working proactively to keep everything up to date has been invaluable. This is even reflected in the decrease in incident tickets and, to our teams' great satisfaction, the same effect on late-night hotline calls.” 

He concluded: “A standout benefit is Aiven's commitment to communication and collaboration. Their team is always available, and we've organised multiple training sessions and workshops together. A notable event was an offsite where La Redoute employees could join Aiven experts for learning and team building. This collaboration makes Aiven feel like an extension of our team, not just another service provider.”