About the Company
Shopzone is a cloud-native e-commerce platform that enables customers to browse products, place orders, and manage their accounts online. The company operates with a lean internal team of 10 to 15 people, supporting a steady baseline of approximately 500 orders per day, with demand rising to roughly double that volume during promotional campaigns and peak shopping periods.
Customer Challenge
As Shopzone grew, the gap between its steady baseline demand and the sharp increases it experienced during promotional periods became a recurring operational risk. Before working with Descasio, scaling infrastructure ahead of a known promotion required manual capacity planning, and the platform had no automated way to respond to unexpected spikes in shopping activity. This left the business exposed on both sides: either provisioning permanently for peak capacity and paying for infrastructure it didn’t need most of the time, or risking degraded performance and downtime during the exact periods that mattered most to revenue. Software releases were also slower than the business needed; manual deployment processes made it harder to ship improvements quickly, particularly ahead of planned sales events.
Partner’s Solution
Descasio deployed Shopzone’s platform on Amazon ECS running on AWS Fargate, using ECS Service Auto Scaling to automatically expand and contract task count in response to CPU utilization and request volume. This became the core mechanism through which Shopzone absorbs demand spikes of up to 2x baseline without permanently over-provisioning infrastructure. An Application Load Balancer distributes traffic across the running tasks and scales alongside them.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, deployed in a Multi-AZ configuration, stores product and order data, a deliberate choice to protect order continuity specifically during high-demand periods, when an outage would carry the greatest direct revenue impact. Amazon S3 stores product images and static assets, keeping media storage decoupled from the application and database layer so a growing product catalogue doesn’t affect application performance.
To address the release speed challenge, Descasio implemented a fully automated CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions, building and testing the application on every code change, scanning container images through Amazon ECR before deployment, and rolling out updates to ECS with automatic health-check-based rollback. All infrastructure was provisioned through Terraform as version-controlled code, and Amazon CloudWatch was configured to centralize monitoring and logging, with particular attention to scaling behavior during peak periods.
Results and Benefits
- Shopzone’s infrastructure now scales automatically with demand, absorbing peak shopping periods without manual intervention or permanent over-provisioning.
- Deployment lead time was reduced from a multi-day manual process to well under an hour from code commit to production, enabling faster, more frequent feature releases.
- Platform availability during peak demand periods improved measurably following the move to automated scaling and Multi-AZ database resilience.
- Shopzone’s team can now focus on the product and business rather than manually planning infrastructure capacity ahead of each promotional event.
About the Partner
Descasio is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with over 15 years of experience helping organizations modernize and optimize their digital infrastructure. Since 2010, Descasio has supported more than 400 organisations across the energy, financial services, retail, and public sectors with cloud transformation, governance, security, and managed services solutions.