Summary
A prominent global retailer enjoyed phenomenal success. It provided a smooth e-commerce shopper experience and optimized its supply chain, but its infrastructure and cloud costs were rising out of control. To mitigate these costs without compromising the features that make it successful, the retail giant turned to a high-performance Java platform.
- Infrastructure and platform teams use Platform Prime to meet performance SLAs and improve carrying capacity
- They pushed individual CPU utilization thresholds higher by switching to Azul Platform Prime
- Teams saw an immediate increase in CPU efficiency of 20%+
- They reduced their minimum number of pods per application
- They reduced overprovisioning of statically scaled fleets
When a prominent global retailer committed to consistently low prices to drive customer loyalty, it began achieving phenomenal success. That success has been remarkably consistent, but it has come at a cost. To remain competitive, the company had to maintain economies of scale, low operating costs, a smooth e-commerce shopper experience, and an optimized supply chain. With cloud and infrastructure costs rising out of control, enterprise leaders made optimizing cloud costs a top priority.
Online shoppers are growing more sophisticated and demanding, and retailers must continually improve the shopping experience to retain customers. Most shoppers will abandon a site after waiting just 3 seconds for a page to load.
KEY STAT: 57% of shoppers will abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load. [Drip]
Faster code for lower cloud costs
Hundreds of the retailer’s e-commerce application teams use Java applications in a complex Java estate that runs both on-premises and in the cloud. To combat rising cloud costs, they switched to Azul Platform Prime, a high-performance Java platform that runs Java code faster.
Right-sizing and autoscaling instances are important functions for reducing cloud costs. Moving applications to the cloud without implementing cost optimization best practices can be a mistake. To optimize costs, organizations must continuously monitor and adjust resources, taking full advantage of the cloud’s dynamic capabilities.
Key stat: Workload optimization is the top priority for 50% of FinOps practitioners. FinOps.org
Infrastructure and platform teams include Platform Prime in a standard container image that is built and managed centrally. Application owners leverage the pre-built image with the JVM and only focus on the code they need for their applications.
They use Platform Prime to meet performance SLAs and improve carrying capacity across a variety of e-commerce and data analytics workloads, including:
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The retail giant also pushed individual CPU utilization thresholds higher through responsible, incremental increases – just by switching their Java distribution to Azul. This proved an easier way to reduce cloud costs than the effort it took to manage spot instances.
A high-performance Java platform yields results
Azul Platform Prime is a high-performance Java platform that cuts infrastructure costs by 20%+. Prime delivers superior speed, startup and warmup, and consistency vs. other OpenJDK distributions to increase responsiveness, optimize compute and boost operational efficiency – all without recompiling or changing application code. The company saw an immediate reduction in the required cloud compute resources – i.e. CPU with a direct reduction of costs. Overall, the company saw improvements in three fundamental ways.
| Cloud Cost & Instance Reduction | Improved Performance | DevOps & Operational Efficiency |
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The world’s top retail and e-commerce businesses look for every edge to provide better shopping experiences than their competitors, and their decisions impact their IT spending and technology choices. Java is the dominant underlying infrastructure used to build applications in retail, and performance can have a material impact on a retailer’s success.
Out-of-the box OpenJDK distributions can negatively impact e-commerce application performance and damage purchasing conversion rates, average order values, ad recommendations, and customer loyalty.
Azul Platform Prime can cut your infrastructure costs by 20%+
Cloud and engineering teams use Azul Platform Prime to reduce cloud waste and leverage committed cloud spend, lowering cloud bills by 20% or more, while improving carrying capacity and maintaining service levels for growing workloads. Platform Prime is built on OpenJDK, but several improved and added features help organizations improve application performance and run applications more efficiently.:
- Accelerate Java warmup: ReadyNow Orchestrator technology runs at full speed at the outset of every retail day.
- Run fast all day: Falcon JIT Compiler delivers improved real-time performance optimizations.
- Enhance application performance: Cloud Native Compiler offloads JIT compilation from the actual running of Java applications.
- Smooth operational rollouts of Java fleets: Optimizer Hub provides the best customer experience at the lowest cost of ownership.
