UNILEVER Case Study - AWS

This Article shows the case study of Global Cloud Leader that is Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) Cloud . In this we'll see the case study of UNILEVER with AWS cloud.

INTRODUCTION:

Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational consumer goods giant which sells food, home care, refreshments, and personal care products. It is one of the oldest multinational companies and its products are available in around 190 countries. It is headquartered in London, United Kingdom and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and subsidiaries in over 90 countries. 

Unilever products include food, sweets, energy drinks, baby food, soft drinks, ice cream, tea, coffee, bottled water, pregnancy tests, juice, beauty products, personal care, breakfast cereals, medicine and pharmaceutical healthcare products. 

Challenges faced by Unilever :

• Unilever needed to re-design its infrastructure to support Unilever’s digital marketing approach.
• It needed to standardize their environment to support a faster time-to-market.
• Unilever optimizes its business model by testing a marketing campaign in a pilot country. If this campaign is proved to be successful, the company deploys it to the other countries and regions. To implement the same, the IT organization wanted to use the cloud computing.

Why Amazon Web Services ?

• According to Unilever, it’s priorities in choosing AWS as a digital marketing platform included flexibility, a global infrastructure, technology, as well as a rich ecosystem of members. 
• They think that with AWS they have the same hosting provider for all regions, which means they don’t have to customize and tweak hosting solutions per region.
• Also they’re able to spend less and get more innovation by working with AWS and members of the AWS Partner Network.

“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial." - Nick Morgan

AWS Migration :

The Unilever IT team had two goals for the AWS migration:

• To deliver a common technology platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture
• migrate existing web properties to the cloud.

Steps for setting up the environment -

1. Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture which will help to develop the platform. Then the DMS team built a pilot platform (a disaster recovery site for third-party hosting in Miami) for stakeholder review.
2. After obtaining business approval, Unilever chose CSS Corporation, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the Amazon Partner Network (APN), for system integration and application development.
3. The DMS team worked with CSS to develop a global content management system (CMS) . The CMS platform lets agencies build brand web sites globally and publish them across several AWS regions.
4. Unilever uses a HAProxy load balancer to improve performance of its web sites and runs its databases on Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.

SERVICES USED BY UNILEVER :

1. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) : Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.

Unilever stores backup data, snapshots, product and recipe media files in Amazon S3 for disaster recovery.

2. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) : Amazon EBS is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. A broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.

3. EBS Snapshot Copy : EBS Snapshot Copy enables to copy EBS snapshots across AWS regions, thus making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions and accelerate geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.

Unilever uses this to copy Amazon EBS snapshots from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the US West (Northern California) Region. It can deploy instances across different AWS Regions and Availability Zones and use Amazon EBS snapshots to bring services back.

4. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) : Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It provides with a complete control of computing resources and lets us run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Unilever created AMIs running Windows and Linux for use on approximately 400 Amazon EC2 instances. 

5. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) : Amazon VPC lets to provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud to launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. They have complete control over this virtual networking environment, including selection of own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.

For Unilever, Amazon VPC provides flexibility for deployments and access to the Internet. 

6. AWS Auto Scaling : AWS Auto Scaling monitors our applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it’s easy to setup application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes. The service provides a simple, powerful user interface that lets you build scaling plans for resources including Amazon EC2 instances and Spot Fleets, Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon DynamoDB tables and indexes, and Amazon Aurora Replicas. Unilever use AWS Auto Scaling as well as manual scaling for sites such as Recipedia.com and Axeapollo.com. 

To migrate its web properties to the cloud, Unilever built pre-production and production environments on AWS for various existing websites. Once Unilever’s creative and production agencies certified the website in the pre-production environment, Unilever switched the DNS address for production environment to go live on AWS.

Growth of Unilever after using AWS -

After a successful pilot launch, Unilever migrated more than 500 web properties from its data centers to AWS in less than five months. Since then, Unilever has more than 1,700 web properties running on AWS worldwide. Throughout their business globally, they strive to create repeatable models and it’s easy to standardize our hosting environment with AWS.

CSS supplied Unilever with machine images of different operating systems, APIs and tools to automate the process of launching a new project. The way CSS automated launching instances reduced the time to launch a project by about 75 percent.

BENEFITS :

• Improved business agility and operational efficiency.
• Responsiveness of the AWS Cloud.
• Rapid rate of innovation.
• .Saves time and manages the cost efficiently.
• Improved time to launch digital marketing campaigns.

More Companies using AWS :-

• Netflix
• BBC
• Airbnb
• Johnson & Johnson
• Samsung
• Spotify
• Hotstar
• Justdial
• Myntra
• NFL
• Slack

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