What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network offered by Amazon Web Services. It securely transfers content such as software, SDKs, and videos to clients with high transfer speeds. It helps to:

• Increase productivity while maintaining user-friendliness
• Cache your content in edge locations to reduce workload
• Provide high security through the “Content Privacy” feature.
• Utilize HTTPS protocols for fast content delivery.
• Support geo-targeting services for delivering content to specific end users.

The Amazon CloudFront solved the performance and scalability issues, providing Zalando’s development teams more insight, flexibility, and control. Eventually, the shift set the stage for long-term innovation and large-scale customer happiness.

Amazon CloudFront Case Study: Challenges Faced by Zalando

In the face of rapid expansion, Zalando sought to maximize its offerings. With more than 49 million active users, Zalando links consumers with brands and goods in 25 European regions. Rich media content is integral to Zalando’s website and app to enhance the online customer experience. However, the company’s image management, transformation, and delivery system have limited visibility and control for developers. All these factors are crucial for sustaining growth and delivering a unique customer experience.

Zalando migrated its media management and delivery system to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by leveraging Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service designed for developer simplicity, security, and high performance. Using CloudFront, Zalando enhanced developer observability, scalability, and online purchasing experiences.

Strengthening Developer Ownership to Promote Development

Due to substantial expansion, Zalando outgrew its prior image management system, which provided its engineering and product teams with few configuration options. Furthermore, few operational insights were available, making it difficult to see how well the service was doing and what improvements could be made. It affected Zalando’s capacity to modify and enhance its online stores. Delivering a consistent client experience during high-demand seasonal events was made difficult by the absence of comprehensive reporting regarding image transformation.

To overcome these obstacles and to develop their new media management system, the Zalando team used Amazon CloudFront. Because of its programmability and flexibility, Amazon CloudFront became crucial for scaling operations and keeping up with rising client demand.

Migrating to AWS Edge

Zalando executed its migration quickly and effectively. The company coordinated its migration schedule with AWS’s Enterprise Support, Service Specialists, and Service Teams to avoid conflicts with customer campaigns and market events. Small client groups were used in the initial stages of the conversion so that the business could identify any areas for improvement without significantly impacting Zalando customers. During this procedure, Zalando moved more than 20 websites and apps, totaling 26.93 PB of data. CloudFront’s peak load has consistently surpassed 100,000 requests per second.

The development team enhanced the image-delivery method using Zalando’s prelaunch hands-on access to CloudFront Functions. The team was pleased to receive support on several levels throughout several stages. Regular contact began very early on, while they looked for proofs of concept and sent the code to verify its legitimacy and identify any obstacles.

Zalando started using CloudFront Functions in production in May 2021. Smooth configuration is a significant change with CloudFront Functions. On an operational level and for daily development, it makes it easier to deploy and reliably revert tasks and scale on demand. Zalando swiftly overcame challenges by implementing the new solution across its online domains. Zalando needed to be able to roll back quickly when necessary, making changes before actual downtime could happen. For various use cases, Zalando now employs both Lambda@Edge and CloudFront Functions. Multiple layers of edge computing give developers greater flexibility, visibility, and control while improving the client experience. It enabled Zalando to respond quickly and provide better consumer and business services.

Since the move, Zalando has been attaining cache hit percentages of 99.5 percent, and its new image-delivery system serves almost five billion images daily. They didn’t face any challenges with Amazon CloudFront. With about 250 million online orders after the transformation, Zalando’s CloudFront solution’s size and effectiveness were crucial in providing a first-rate consumer experience.

Additional optimizations made by Zalando have resulted in a threefold decrease in requests for nonoptimized photos on the home screens of the company’s online and mobile applications. Because of its improved efficiency and versatility, teams within Zalando have shifted to utilize the pipeline built on CloudFront for additional kinds of material.

Fostering Client Interaction

Using AWS, Zalando intends to keep innovating in managing and manipulating rich media assets. By developing an interactive e-commerce solution with AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video converting service with broadcast-grade features, it intends to promote consumer interaction. To better serve its clients, Zalando moved to CloudFront to enhance the media management and delivery systems that influence the shopping experience. Zalando could carry out a seamless move with the help of the AWS team, which had significant advantages. The business benefits of using Amazon CloudFront are the operational flexibility and the ability to monitor the health of the solution, experiment, and reverse changes quickly.

Summing Up

Zalando’s decision to strategically switch to Amazon CloudFront was a watershed moment in its quest to provide a better, more scalable consumer experience. By tackling important issues with media delivery, performance, and developer control, Zalando increased operational efficiency and enhanced the user experience across all platforms. This success story illustrates how intelligent content delivery systems can enhance long-term value, performance, and customer satisfaction in digital commerce as the company grows and changes.