About MyDeal
MyDeal.com.au is a leading Australian online retail marketplace focused on lifestyle and household goods. MyDeal has over 800 active sellers providing more than 5 million products across 2,000 categories. The majority of those selling through MyDeal are Australian-owned and operated businesses.
MyDeal was founded in Melbourne by Sean Senvirtne in 2011 and became a publicly listed company on the Australia Stock Exchange (ASX) in October 2020. Its mission is to make life more affordable for all Australians by offering the best value on an extensive range of products, coupled with amazing customer service for a seamless shopping experience. MyDeal is dedicated to product quality, safeguarding customer interests, and supporting fair trade. They have demonstrated this commitment by signing up for the ACCC (Australian Competition Consumer Commission) Product Safety Pledge.
The Business Challenge
MyDeal is a bespoke solution already hosted in the AWS environment. To improve its security and ability to scale, MyDeal understood the need to modernise its existing infrastructure to increase resilience and productivity. In addition, modernisation would ensure the trustworthiness of their data and guarantee updated insights allowing them to make the best business decisions, evaluate their system health and increase productivity.
By choosing to modernise, MyDeal was preparing itself for the future. This means they could reduce the risk of potential system failures that could lead to the inability to trade for a prolonged period of time, ensuring they do not lose income on big sales events and, most importantly, protecting their reputation. Modernisation would free up time for their existing development team to focus on the creation of new features in response to a continuous customer experience approach. As a bonus, modernisation facilitates the process of attracting and retaining more skilled professionals for the MyDeal team.
DNX Solutions Delivers a One-year Transformation Project in just 6 Months
The DNX team, along with AWS, performed an extensive review of MyDeal’s infrastructure and business objectives, resulting in a clear roadmap showcasing phases, cost, timeframe, priorities, and the next steps allowing their team to continue using the best AWS practices and latest techniques to develop applications.
The project was divided into 3 phases:
In Phase 1, the DNX team built a well-architected cloud platform foundation ready to deploy the AWS platform by using Citadel Foundation. The new environment uses Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Search, Redis, RDS, SQS, OpenSearch, Secrets with Terraform, and uses CI/CD pipeline.
DNX built all the logic environments (production, staging, dev, etc) making an easy and user-friendly way for MyDeal’s developers to spin up new environments. Using IaC ensures this environment is the same as production.
In phase 2, the DNX team created a cloud-native platform to support MyDeal applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk in CI/CD pipeline.
In phase 3, DNX implemented application transformation with all applications on EC2s towards Elastic Beanstalk with a proper full CI/CD pipeline.
All the deployments are automated to ensure MyDeal hits production and supports all applications: windows .NET, messaging, Task Services, CI/CD, Deployment process, metrics, logs, autoscaling, and alarming. DNX created pipelines that allow MyDeal’s team to deploy applications in the environment they want simply by pressing a button. Blue/Green deployments were enabled to make sure the team can test the application before going live. The different services were separated and alarms were implemented to verify potential errors in the applications and database and scaling of the application.
DNX delivered all key components to the new platform for the MyDeal team to transition to a new production environment at their own pace. MyDeal utilised DNX’s managed services during and post-transition to ensure everything continued to run smoothly.
AWS Services Used
Outcomes
Increased Security
Citadel Foundation is a platform built with infrastructure as code and open-source technologies, designed with well-architected principles for AWS. This means implementing a strong identity foundation, applying security in all layers, automating security best practices, and increasing security and data protection. By using Citadel, DNX saved the time needed to build a secure infrastructure from scratch and was able to deliver MyDeal’s solution in a significantly reduced timeframe.
Improved Performance
By automating the existing process, MyDeal’s team can focus on product development rather than resource provisioning and management.
Improved Reliability
By monitoring MyDeal’s system performance, their team can remediate any issues before they impact customers and implement automated recovery processes that work around or repair the failure.
Increased Agility
The increased flexibility and agility that the cloud enables encourages innovation and fast-paced development and deployment. It eliminates the manual processes and time associated with provisioning AWS Well-Architected Framework Best Practices on-premises infrastructure and then deploying the resources.
Improved Scalability
Auto Scaling ensures elasticity at minimal effort and increases staff productivity by eliminating manual capacity planning work.
DNX’s Unique Approach
DNX holds the AWS Security and DevOps APN Competencies and is an AWS Well-Architected partner. This means all DNX projects are delivered with the best operational and architectural practices, keeping customers like MyDeal secure while helping them move quickly with Citadel Foundation.
The project was delivered by dedicated hands-on professionals from our digital, data, and cloud squads utilising Agile methodology with the DevOps concept.
In the Agile methodology, the project scope is planned and distributed in sprints according to priorities, dependencies, and the value delivered. The DNX team is constantly listening to and answering clients’ requests as unexpected demands arise and change during the project.
This ensures constant delivery, allowing a one-year project to be achieved in just six months. Moreover, DNX delivers value to the clients from the very beginning.
DevOps removes organisational constructs with the aim of bringing different areas of MyDeal together to enable agile development. It emphasises collaboration and communication and requires all teams to be responsive and to perform risk evaluation.
During the entire project, DNX shares knowledge of the infrastructure being built, cloud concepts, and best AWS and industry practices for better application building. This knowledge sharing empowers the client to maintain their new environment in a safe, reliable, and efficient manner after project completion.
Next Steps
Going forward, the DNX team will continue to support MyDeal on its path to full Windows and data modernisation. A detailed Windows discovery will take place where the DNX and MyDeal teams discuss the current state of MyDeal’s architecture, infrastructure, release process, and business process. The final result will be a modernisation roadmap, workload assessment, windows modernisation roadmap, target architecture, and modernisation project plan all based on informed decisions.
In addition, DNX will continue enabling and empowering the MyDeal team through workshops and the AWS Developer Acceleration (DevAx) enablement program.
During our selection process, DNX Solutions stood out as the most comprehensive approach that was tailored to our business. It was easy to communicate our unique circumstances and see it represented in the plan, and their team was quite flexible on the approach to use. The end result gives us a platform that we can be confident adheres to best practices and allows us to extend as our business grows. It’s a huge weight off our team knowing that we have this space well covered and can now focus on our continued development uplift efforts
