To ensure that prices are kept low for customers, nakedbus.com engaged Fronde to help drive down the costs of their technology platform.
To ensure that prices are kept low for customers, nakedbus.com engaged Fronde to help drive down the costs of their technology platform.
Nakedbus.com, a provider of low-cost inter city bus transport services around New Zealand, needed a platform that could cope with sales promotions and the ability to make changes to the application quickly to respond to the marketplace. Fronde advised on and implemented the migration of nakedbus.com applications from WebDrive to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
With no requirement for upfront investment nakedbus.com was able to replace upfront capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs.
Increased flexibility, scalability and reliability of the new low-cost system enabled nakedbus.com to run large scale promotions such as GrabOne, increasing sales and revenue for the business.
Technical Solution Snapshot
Fronde designed a highly-available web application architecture optimised for AWS. This architecture is based on AWS best-practice with instances spread across multiple AWS availability zones for high-availability. Elastic Load Balancing distributes customer requests across the Apache-based web tier. Tomcat application servers make up the core processing layer of the system handling customer bookings. The back-end MySQL database is provided by the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) and uses the Multi-AZ feature of RDS to give high-availability and “intervention free” fail over.
To drive down operational costs, deployment, monitoring and backup tasks are scripted or automated. This allows for easy horizontal scaling of the web and application tiers to handle spikes in customer traffic. Further operational simplicity and reliability has been achieved through using Amazon’s platform services such as Route 53 and the Simple Email Service (SES) - these let Fronde and nakedbus.com get on with investing time and energy improving the application rather than managing infrastructure.
Amazon products used:
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SMS)
- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service
Hamish Nuttall, CEO of nakedbus.com said,
"Moving to AWS platform gave us more flexibility and transparency. This allows us to have more control over our system which enabled us to grow our business. Not to mention the savings we gained in 6 months was enough to cover the entire cost of moving."
*These case studies are from our archives. Exact publish dates are not known.
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