Zagana is an online platform for fresh fruits and vegetables sourced directly from our local farmers here in the Philippines. Due to an increased demand and application traffic, Apper enabled Zagana to migrate from its existing infrastructure to AWS and conduct performance and load testing, among other parameters, to ensure that all systems are healthy and working efficiently based on the acceptance criteria.
About the Customer
Zagana aims to uplift the lives of Filipino farmers and give consumers access to safe and healthy goods. It takes pride in delivering high-quality and guaranteed fresh farm-to-table produce. Zagana’s products are naturally grown in a toxin-free environment. They are then taken to a processing plant to be pre cut and nitro-sealed. After undergoing sorting in the packaging center, these products are uploaded on the Zagana portal for their customers to purchase. Delivery of these quality products are made door-to-door for clients.
Customer Challenge
With the increased application traffic and user base, Zagana needed to redesign its infrastructure. Before the engagement with Apper, their application was hosted on Heroku. The limited flexibility of automatic scaling resulted in service outages and application downtime.
Why the Customer Chose the Partner
We, Apper are an APN (Amazon Web Services Partner Network) Consulting Partner that provides professional consulting services for cloud infrastructure, application architecture, cost optimization, and cloud security. In order to support Zagana’s increasing demand, the first step would be to migrate its existing infrastructure from Heroku to AWS.
Partner Solutions
After a comprehensive review and technical planning, Zagana gave us the go signal to migrate its website to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The implementation was divided into several phases:
The first phase involved the implementation of IaC (Infrastructure as a Code) or the automated provisioning of their infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation which gives them a significant increase in the operability and portability of their existing system.
The second phase began with the implementation of their CI/CD pipeline that is incorporated into their current development workflow using AWS CodePipeline. It allows their developers to easily deploy application changes which increases the velocity and reliability of their feature deployments.
To add, to improve the Zagana database’s cost efficiency and performance, newer generation Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors were chosen for implementation.
Lastly, we conducted performance and load testing to ensure that all systems are healthy and working efficiently based on the acceptance criteria. Once the verification is done, we execute the actual domain cutover from their legacy system to their new production environment hosted on AWS.
Results and Benefits
Migration to AWS was aligned with Zagana’s goal of website expansion and user growth as they generated a 200% increase in their website users. This then translated into an increase in their sales by almost 150% within a span of only three months from February to April.
The benefits gained from this migration transcended past the sales aspect of Zagana’s business. On the technological side, speed development has cut down deployment time by almost 50%. This helped the tech team focus on the core functions of their business and product enhancement to provide optimal customer experience. It impacted all other channels aside from the website since the decreased deployment time enabled developers to focus more on conceptualizing the latest releases and updates that will enhance customer engagement.
On the operational level, back-end processes were significantly improved. Prior to AWS, data and files were manually recorded with a delay. Zagana’s team needed to encode twice: one in their system and one in another software for back-up.
The process automation hastened purchase (PO) processing and data encoding for their inventory of more than 300 SKUs. Harvesting of sales data was substantially faster which led to better inventory tracking and management and overall sales performance.
What this means for Zagana’s team is a seamless process flow for their sales, procurement and purchase processing. The biggest impact of this partnership lies in the faster and more efficient decision-making. Since important business data can now be monitored and obtained real-time, key stakeholders, developers and decision makers are able to make mission-critical decisions with a higher level of accuracy and precision.
Zagana’s transition to AWS has allowed their team to focus on more meaningful tasks that directly impacts their decision-making. In turn, they were able to provide a smoother e-commerce experience for their customers which is a hallmark of driving consumer loyalty and acquisition. The partnership between Zagana and Apper proved successful as it strengthened belief that with the new normal, consumer behavior favors technologies that enable them to do essential tasks, like buying basic necessities such as Zagana’s fresh produce, while staying safely at their own homes.