No more outages during Black Friday. Scalable e-commerce infrastructure in the AWS cloud.
Tink is an expert in smart home systems and the first e-commerce platform to compare such products. It started its operations in Berlin in 2016 and now also operates in the United States, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Tink collaborates with our team of experts to optimize the performance of its online store.
Services Used:
Client:
tink GmbH
Industry:
E-commerce
Technologies:
AWS
Terraform
AWS CloudFormation
Varnish
Amazon EFS
Amazon RDS
Amazon S3
Business Challenges
Building a new, fully cloud-based environment on AWS was a key business decision for Tink, aimed at unlocking the company’s sales potential in new markets. In the face of growing traffic and planned expansion, the existing Magento infrastructure generated a number of critical challenges:
Lack of stability during sales peaks (Black Friday):
The store was unable to handle sudden surges in user traffic. Platform failures on the most profitable days of the year (such as Black Friday) directly translated into lost sales and customer frustration.
Inefficiency of the existing e-commerce platform (Magento):
General performance and speed issues with the store, which hindered its development and required comprehensive optimization to ensure a smooth shopping experience for users.
Technological limitations in global expansion:
The necessity of searching for and configuring local infrastructure providers (servers) with each entry into a new market, which drastically slowed down the company’s development plans.
Rapid deployment in new foreign markets:
The business need for instant and seamless launch of additional store instances in the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium, among others, which required creating a highly repeatable and scalable environment.
Thanks to optimization and the new AWS-based architecture, we no longer have to worry about whether our store will survive Black Friday. The highly efficient and fully scalable infrastructure has given us operational peace of mind and was a key factor enabling the rapid deployment of our platform in new foreign markets.
Head of Product
Dominik Stürzekarn
tink GmbH
Architects of Scalable Cloud Infrastructure
We took full responsibility for the technological foundations of the Tink platform. Our main task was to design and implement a modern cloud environment in AWS from scratch, which would eliminate existing bottlenecks, automate processes, and guarantee the store’s reliability during the largest sales peaks.
To prepare the platform for global expansion, we carried out the following scope of work:
AWS Strategy and Architecture Design: We developed a comprehensive action plan precisely tailored to the specifics of the Magento engine, defining the necessary cloud services and preparing a rigorous performance testing plan.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Implementation: Using Terraform, we described the entire architecture in code, ensuring its full repeatability and enabling rapid deployment of the platform in new foreign markets without the need to search for local providers.
Building a Highly Available Environment: We introduced advanced automatic scaling mechanisms that dynamically adjust computing resources to current traffic. We also utilized Varnish engines to guarantee maximum speed and availability of the store.
Data Layer Optimization: We migrated relational databases to the managed Amazon RDS service and static objects to Amazon S3 (supported by a CDN). We also implemented a shared network drive (Amazon EFS), optimizing information flow.
Rigorous Performance Testing: Before the new environment went into production, we jointly conducted hundreds of advanced load tests, ensuring that the infrastructure would 100% reliably handle every sales scenario – including Black Friday campaigns.
Impact and Business Benefits
Migrating the Tink platform’s infrastructure to the AWS cloud brought immediate and tangible business benefits. The store gained full reliability, which permanently eliminated the problem of outages during key sales periods and gave the team a sense of operational security. The flexible architecture we built also became the technological foundation that enabled the brand’s global expansion without barriers or delays.
Key Results:
store uptime
during the most demanding promotional campaigns (including Black Friday).
markets served from a single, scalable architecture
(seamless transition from the German market to the markets of: USA, Sweden, Netherlands, and Belgium).
Ready for Every Sales Peak and New Markets
Migrating e-commerce to the AWS cloud completely transformed the technological backend of the Tink platform. The highly efficient, scalable, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) managed environment freed the team from the need to manually manage local servers. Instead of worrying about whether the infrastructure would withstand the next major traffic surge, Tink can now freely plan global expansion and focus on its key goal: delivering the best smart home systems to customers virtually worldwide.
