About Swogo
Swogo is revolutionizing the cross-sell platform for leading retailers worldwide – creating the perfect match by combining an understanding of their product range alongside customer behavior whilst considering the customer’s availability.
Using a unique approach that focuses on understanding a retailer’s product assortment, Swogo Product Graph ™ combines machine learning and AI algorithms and surpassed 1.5 billion bundle recommendations in the first half of 2019. However, with growth comes new challenges.
Challenges
Prior to working with CloudZone, Swogo ran their solution on bare VMs using OpsWorks but wanted to adopt containerized workloads for better scalability and resource sharing later on, using either ECS or EKS.
Swogo approached CloudZone for a Well-Architected Review to help them overcome these obstacles. The review was conducted in two parts and identified several areas where Swogo’s system could be improved. After the review, CloudZone’s team of experts found a few dozens of security risks – both high and medium-risk – that needed to be addressed 24 high-risk items and 13 medium-risk items that needed to be addressed.
Solution
With the help of CloudZone’s expertise, Swogo was able to address the challenges identified during the review and implement the proposed security solutions. CloudZone helped Swogo by:
- Setting up AWS Config with basic rules, AWS GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub.
- Planning AWS SSM implementation for patch management and secured IAM, including blocking unused regions and reviewing roles/users.
- Defining and setting up AWS resource tags and reviewing CloudWatch workload metrics.
- Reviewing CloudHealth reports providing further recommendations and setting CloudHealth budgets per resource type.
- Assisting them to achieve greater security and efficiency, continue their growth trajectory, and provide even better service to their clients.
Additionally, the CloudZone team helped Swogo build an MVP and continuously improved its solution – a multi-tenant stack at its core but with customer separation at the data layer. Swogo uses CloudFront, WAF, Load Balancers, and EC2 based stack for their production API layer. Scaling is now automated, correlated to customer engagement. Additionally, Swogo now uses Lambda for background processes as well as Mongo (a self-managed replica set) and DynamoDB for their data layer. Their CI/CD workflow is automated with CodePipeline, for testing and deployment.
Results
Swogo now enjoys average savings of 28% by using CloudFront Private Pricing Agreement rather than on-demand AWS Pricing. Moreover, thanks to CloudZone, Swogo has achieved 90% coverage (and 10% on demand) of EC2. This means that 90% of Swogo’s EC2 environment is covered via saving plan commitments, saving them approximately 25% compared to on-demand pricing. The savings per month are about 10% of Swogo’s total spend. Swogo’s account is managed via CloudZone’s unique reselling model.
Swogo CTO José Silva said, “Having CloudZone’s team expertise at our service at no additional costs while optionally being able to use their value-added services to accelerate us proved to be a no-brainer for our business.”
With CloudZone’s help, Swogo overcame its challenges and continued providing automated cross-sell bundles that generate incremental margins for leading retailers worldwide.
