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Dunelm's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Ecommerce Speed and Security with Fastly
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Construction & Infrastructure
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Last Mile Delivery
- Traffic Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Dunelm, one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K., was facing challenges with its ecommerce platform. The company, which offers hundreds of thousands of products online and operates over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores, was looking to support a major digital transformation initiative. The goal was to increase speed for their shoppers across web and mobile storefronts, enhance security, deliver site updates faster at scale, and augment an infrastructure-as-code strategy. In early 2017, Dunelm undertook a major re-platforming initiative that would allow engineering teams to leverage the many advantages of cloud technologies. However, during the new stack rollout, a major incident occurred which affected their Google Product Listings Advertisements, impacting the team’s ability to sell products on their new platform.
About The Customer
Dunelm is one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K. The company offers hundreds of thousands of products on their ecommerce site as well as over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores across the country. Dunelm also operates its own home delivery system and maintains a nationwide fleet of delivery trucks. To keep the business running smoothly, over 200 engineers build and manage a portfolio of applications, including a robust ecommerce site and a suite of internal tools. Dunelm’s engineering organization is split into small, autonomous teams based in the U.K. and Portugal. The platform team is a shared service that provides DevOps, automation, site reliability, tooling, infrastructure, as well as other services that they rely on.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Dunelm switched to Fastly, a modern content delivery network. The new headless and serverless platform, with API-driven and microservices architecture, was rolled out in October 2019. To align with their new infrastructure-as-code strategy, the platform team sought to consolidate content delivery, with the goals enabling the wider engineering organization to be more agile and responsive to business needs. During the new stack rollout, the team decided to route 100% of traffic through Fastly right away. Fastly’s edge computing technology is highly configurable and enables Dunelm teams to harness the power of the edge to deliver innovative and personalized customer experiences. Fastly’s platform simplifies management of content delivery in one unified place, which standardizes CDN services across the organization and improves collaboration.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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