How we achieved 40% reduction in leasing application maintenance cost with application modernization

The customer turned to zeb, an advanced tier AWS partner, to implement a modern, cloud-native solution. zeb utilized AWS’s scalable, cost-efficient architecture to migrate customer’s legacy system to a microservices-based cloud platform, ensuring improved scalability, reduced costs, and better operational efficiency.

The Challenge

Our customer relied on a 10-year-old, on-prem legacy POS system built by multiple vendors. The system, used across 2000+ stores, was unable to handle growing customer traffic efficiently and required extensive manual intervention for maintenance. This led to delays, high costs, and reliance on third-party vendors for system updates. Our customer faced significant operational inefficiencies and scalability issues, impacting customer satisfaction and business performance.

Key Challenges:

• Legacy infrastructure unable to scale dynamically with traffic
• High maintenance costs and manual operations
• Dependency on third-party vendors for system upgrades
• Slow deployments and updates, limiting business agility

Primary objectives

Our customer sought to modernize its legacy POS system with the following key objectives:

• Enhanced User Experience: Provide a seamless, intuitive UI interface for both store and field users, ensuring faster transaction times and improved customer satisfaction.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Migrate from an on-prem Oracle Exadata infrastructure to a cloud-native architecture that can scale dynamically with fluctuating traffic and business needs.
• Cost Efficiency: Reduce operational and maintenance costs by automating deployments, upgrades, and reducing dependency on third-party vendors.
• Improved Data Management: Streamline the management of 8TB of transactional data and 16TB of Blob data to ensure faster, more efficient data access and processing.

Architecture and Service used

The application was built using a comprehensive suite of AWS services to ensure scalability, security, and performance:

• AWS Lambda – Serverless compute for dynamic scaling.
• Amazon ECS with Fargate – Managed container services for microservices.
• Amazon API Gateway – API management and secure communication.
• Amazon CloudWatch – Real-time system monitoring and insights.
• Amazon S3 – Scalable data storage for Blob files.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon SQS – For inter-service messaging.
• Amazon EventBridge – Event-driven service orchestration.
• AWS Application Load Balancer – Managed load distribution across services.
• AWS Secrets Manager – Secure management of credentials and sensitive data.
• AWS Certificate Manager – Managed SSL/TLS certificates for secure communication.
• AWS VPN – Secure connectivity for cloud infrastructure.
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – Core transactional database.
• AWS DMS – Managed data migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.
• AWS Snowball – Offline data transfer of Blob files to Amazon S3.

Timeline

The project was completed within 6 months, starting with a new branding and a holistic UI framework for Customer’s POS system, including a high-fidelity clickable prototype to align with business needs. zeb implemented a phased, one-year rollout approach that built store and field user confidence by syncing data in real time between the legacy and new systems. The 2000-store rollout was completed with zero downtime and no field complaints, ahead of schedule and on budget, leading to an accelerated national rollout after a successful initial deployment.

KPIs and Outcomes

Operational KPIs:

• System Uptime: Achieved 99.99% uptime post-migration, ensuring minimal disruption to store operations.
• Faster Deployments: Automated deployment process reduced deployment times by 50%, improving agility and system updates.
• Data Access Speed: Data retrieval times improved by 40%, leading to faster transactions and enhanced store performance.
• Scalability: The cloud-native infrastructure dynamically scaled with traffic, handling peak loads seamlessly.

Security KPIs:

• Incident Reduction: Enhanced security measures, including role-based access control and AWS security services, significantly decreased security incidents. Our customer experienced reduced vulnerabilities, ensuring better data protection.
• Data Protection: The integration of AWS Secrets Manager and KMS ensured 100% compliance with data security standards, safeguarding customer data.

Financial KPIs:

• Cost Reduction: Our customer saw a 40% reduction in maintenance costs, largely by eliminating reliance on third-party vendors and manual intervention.
• Return on Investment (ROI): The company achieved a 10X ROI on their AWS investment, underscoring the financial efficiency and scalability of the solution.

Qualitative KPIs:

• Improved User Experience: Our customer’s new POS system delivered a more intuitive UI interface, resulting in faster transactions and smoother workflows for store and field users. The system’s ease of use reduced training times and enhanced overall user satisfaction.
• Operational Efficiency: The automation of deployments, updates, and data management significantly reduced manual intervention, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks and improving operational productivity.
• Scalability: The customer’s cloud-based infrastructure allowed for seamless scalability during peak traffic periods, ensuring consistent performance without the need for manual intervention.
• Business Agility: With reduced dependency on third-party vendors, our customer gained the flexibility to deploy updates and enhancements faster, keeping pace with evolving business requirements.

Scalability and Automation:

• Dynamic Scaling: The cloud-native infrastructure, built on AWS Lambda and ECS with Fargate, enabled 100% dynamic scaling, allowing the system to automatically adjust resources based on traffic demand, especially during peak periods, without manual intervention.
• Store Rollout: Successfully deployed the modernized POS system across 2000 stores with zero downtime, demonstrating high scalability and operational stability.
• Reduced Manual Efforts: Automated deployment and CI/CD pipelines resulted in a 50% reduction in manual efforts for system updates and patches.
• Infrastructure as Code: CloudFormation templates facilitated automated infrastructure redeployment, reducing the time to recover from failures by 60%.

Our customer’s journey to modernize its legacy POS infrastructure with zeb’s AWS-based solution resulted in a complete transformation of their operational and business processes. By migrating to a cloud-native, microservices architecture, customer improved scalability, reduced operational costs by 40%, The new system provided seamless store operations with 99.99% uptime and dynamic scaling capabilities, enabling the business to handle peak traffic effortlessly. This modernization positioned the customer for long-term growth, enhanced user experiences, and greater operational efficiency.