Unilever: An Amazon Web Services Case Study, Repost

About Unilever

At first, Unilever was formed in 1930 by the merger of Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie and British soap maker Lever Brothers. Today, the consumer goods giant sells food, home care, refreshments, and personal care products in over 190 countries. Unilever has headquarters in London, United Kingdom, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and subsidiaries in over 90 countries employing more than 170,000 people. Previously, in 2012, Unilever reported more than €51 billion in revenue.

 

The Challenge

To begin with, Unilever North America in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, needed to re-design its infrastructure to support Unilever’s digital marketing approach.

Previously, Unilever used on-premises data centers to host its web properties with different technologies and processes. “We needed to standardize our environment to support a faster time-to-market,” says Sreenivas Yalamanchili, Digital Marketing Services (DMS) Global Technical Manager. Simultaneously, Unilever optimizes its business model by testing a marketing campaign in a pilot country. If the drive is successful, the company deploys it to other countries and regions. The IT organization wanted to use the cloud to implement the same process.

 

Why Amazon Web Services

After a comprehensive RFP and review process involving more than 16 companies, Unilever chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unilever’s priorities in selecting a digital marketing platform included flexibility, a global infrastructure, technology, and a rich ecosystem of members.

“With AWS, we have the same hosting provider for all regions, which means we don’t have to customize and tweak hosting solutions per region,” says Yalamanchili. “Unilever is focused on delivering great brands to consumers; it’s not an IT shop. We can spend less and get more innovation by working with AWS and members of the AWS Partner Network.”

In general, the Unilever IT team had two goals for the AWS migration. The first is to deliver a standard website technology platform with regional content delivery architecture. Secondly, to migrate existing web properties to the cloud.

To begin with, to develop the platform, Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture. Then the DMS team built a pilot platform (a disaster recovery site for third-party hosting in Miami) for stakeholder review. After obtaining business approval, Unilever chose CSS Corporation, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the Amazon Partner Network (APN), for system integration and application development.

The DMS team worked with CSS to develop a global content management system (CMS). The CMS platform lets agencies build brand websites globally and publish them across several AWS regions. Later, Unilever used a HAProxy load balancer to improve the performance of its websites and runs its databases on Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.

Disaster Recovery

For disaster recovery, Unilever stores backup data, snapshots, product, and recipe media files in Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) and uses  EBS Snapshot Copy to copy Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the US West (Northern California) Region. “We designed a disaster recovery solution to protect our content management system, content deployment architecture, and many GOLD-classified web properties—and to give the business confidence in the AWS Cloud,” says Yalamanchili. Certainly, figure 1 demonstrates Unilever’s architecture on AWS.

unilever-arch-diag
Figure 1. Unilever Architecture on AWS

Unilever and CSS created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Windows and Linux on approximately 400 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provides flexibility for deployments and access to the Internet. Nick Morgan, Enterprise Architect for Digital Marketing, comments, “What’s nice about using AWS is how easily we can scale the instances based on the nature of a campaign’s popularity.

We used Auto Scaling and manual scaling for sites such as Recipedia.com and Axeapollo.com. We can deploy instances across different AWS Regions and Availability Zones and use Amazon EBS snapshots to bring services back.”

Migration

To migrate its web properties to the cloud, Unilever built pre-production and production environments on AWS for several existing websites. After that, Unilever’s creative and production agencies certified the website in the pre-production environment. Then Unilever switched the DNS address for the production environment to go live on AWS.

After a successful pilot launch, Unilever migrated over 500 web properties from its data centers to AWS in less than five months. Since then, Unilever has over 1,700 web properties running on AWS worldwide. “Throughout our business globally, we strive to create repeatable models, and it’s easy to standardize our hosting environment with AWS,” says Yalamanchili. “If a marketing campaign that we deploy in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region is successful, we can easily replicate it to Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region for the APAC countries.”

To clarify, CSS supplied Unilever with machine images of different operating systems, APIs, and tools to automate the launching of a new project. “The way CSS automated launching instances reduced the time to launch a project by about 75 percent,” says Morgan. “What used to take four days now only takes one day. We’re not constantly rebuilding web and database servers from the ground up. We can clone and re-use images.”

 

The Benefits

Specifically, for Unilever, moving to the AWS Cloud improved business agility and operational efficiency. “Previously, requesting a website for a marketing campaign was a lengthy process,” says Yalamanchili. “By using AWS, we improved the time to launch a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days. That’s more than seven times faster than our traditional environment. If a brand manager has an idea, they can implement it before the competition,”

“Using AWS saves us time,” he continues. “I can simply go to the AWS website and plug in numbers to calculate costs. That makes it easy for me to set up a standard website billing model. It takes our partner, CSS, less than 12 hours to calculate pricing for a campaign website. I can comfortably say to my marketing folks that we have the capacity for anything we want to do. We can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.”

“The other advantage is the responsiveness of the AWS Cloud,” says Yalamanchili. “Using AWS, one of the brand managers could completely alter a campaign within 24 hours, which wouldn’t happen with the physical infrastructure.”

“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial,” says Morgan. “I enjoy the rapid rate of innovation from AWS.” Yalamanchili adds, “With AWS, it’s the customer’s way, always. As shown above, AWS has proved that the customer matters by listening to us and innovating products and services.”

 

Next Step

To learn more about how AWS can help you run websites, visit our Marketing Websites page: http://aws.amazon.com/websites/.

Also, for more information about how CSS Corporation can help your company run on the AWS Cloud, see CSS Corporation’s listing in the AWS Partner Directory.

Furthermore, the original article can be found here, as well as other case studies:
Unilever
AirBnBConde Nast
Robinhood
Siemens
iRobot
Brooks Brothers

«Back to Blogs & Articles


Like the post? Share it:
Jason Senter
Jason Senter
Executive Director of Sales & Product Management

After finding my footing in the world of technology, I joined Grata Software. I focus on identifying opportunities within your business where technology or processes are lacking, and how we can improve them. When I'm not playing sports or in the kitchen cooking, you can find me here at Grata Software, as the Head of Sales and Product Manager.