Initially created in 2012 to help retailers extend product information to enhance descriptions, titles and imagery, Comestri has become a platform to harmonize master data into a single view, orchestrate information between systems and offer a unified product experience across multiple channels. The Comestri platform is used by businesses globally and empowers merchants to self-manage ecommerce inventories. The platform enables merchants to control how product information is fed to customer touchpoints.
Rapid growth often necessitates rapid modernisation.The company felt held back by its third-party vendor and was looking to migrate to reduce costs and own the intellectual property surrounding its solution.
A modernization challenge
Comestri approached Thoughtworks, an Advanced Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner that specializes in migration and modernisation, because they were:
Reliant on third-party infrastructure, which led to soaring costs
Frustrated with long-term contracts, which compromised their responsiveness
Struggling to independently scale components of their platform as required
Comestri understood that a fast and successful migration was essential to ensure their continued growth and deployment into new regions.
A rising US Dollar and a broad vision to own and control our platform led us to Thoughtworks. Their track record as experts in the ISV/SaaS space made them the ideal partner to support our Modernization Program.
Achieving scalability, cost-reduction and rapid deployment
With a six-month deadline until their hosting contract expired, Thoughtworks developed a strategy to quickly ‘containerize’ Comestri’s solution. This involved:
Delivering a cloud foundation that aligned with AWS’ ‘Well-Architected Framework’ less than a month after the first consultation
Implementing a repeatable ‘infrastructure as code’ solution that enabled the deployment of the same solution across various environments
Assisting with migration from the third-party vendor to in-house hosting on AWS
Providing CloudOps support for the managed platform that Comestri owns and controls
Packaging their application and its dependencies in a container that runs the same way regardless of where it’s deployed would help Comestri achieve its core goals of scalability, cost-reduction and rapid deployment.
Practically, this involved a shift from:
Engine Yard ➤ Amazon ECS
Redis ➤ Amazon ElasticCache
Apache Kafka ➤ Amazon MSK
Outcome
Thoughtworks has helped liberate Comestri’s platform, supporting their goal of international growth.
The partnership has achieved:
Full platform ownership and control – minimizing business risk
Reduced reliance on third-party vendors – driving down costs and increasing agility
Scalability to meet customer needs – supporting a global rollout
With CloudOps support, Comestri’s Cloud Foundation complies with some of the most stringent certifications in the industry – including ISO27001, ISO27017, PCI-DSS, IRAP and GDPR – ensuring that their platform is as secure as possible.
Partnering with Thoughtworks and migrating to AWS was the best approach for taking control of our own solution intellectual property and architecture to reduce business risk and costs and independently scale components aligned with individual customer needs.
