Case studies
Asambeauty – Headless in the AWS Cloud
Asambeauty relies on Skaylink and AWS when it comes to its online store performance. Find out why in our case study.
The family-run company Asam, rich in tradition, was founded in 1963 as Germany’s first production facility for active grape ingredients. After decades of research, the first in-house cosmetics brand M. Asam® was created in 2000, and remains the heart of the company to this day. In 2003, M. Asam went live and became increasingly well-known via teleshopping channels. Four years and numerous cosmetic lines later, the products conquered the international market (France, Italy, USA, UK, Canada, China, Japan) in addition to Germany. 2016 saw the launch of the online platform asambeauty.com, which to this day offers a beauty experience with a wide range of own brands.
At the end of 2019, Asambeauty opted for the Managed AWS Hosting solution from Skaylink. In this interview, Thomas Brünger, Head of IT, tells us more about the switch to Skaylink.
What is your core business and who are your customers?
“asambeauty GmbH is a purely cosmetics company that aims to produce everything from a single source in its own country in a way that conserves resources and to offer tested “Made in Germany” quality. The recipes are researched and developed in our in-house laboratories and bottled in our production facilities in Bavaria. Our range includes face, body and hair care as well as perfumes and decorative cosmetics. Our customers make use of all shopping platforms, from TV to online stores and retail. In addition, we have a growing international clientele.”
Before you started working with us, what were the business challenges you were hoping to solve?
“Our online store was already in the AWS Cloud, but we reached the limits of our previous host with our growing requirements. For this reason, we started looking for a new expert for our AWS hosting.
Our challenges lie in the fact that we are internationally positioned and use several AWS regions. We also have high requirements in terms of fail-safe performance and scalability.”
How was Skaylink able to solve your problem, and what advantages were you able to achieve from this?
“At the beginning of our collaboration, we started by migrating our US store to Skaylink. We then launched our new French online store and finally moved our German store as well. During our switch to Skaylink, we also changed the technical basis of our online stores and now rely on a headless system with Magento2 and DEITY Falcon. Skaylink also carried out several load tests using Stormforger. In the load scenarios, it was important for us to depict actual customer journeys and conversions.
The switch to Skaylink more than paid off for us. We have had no more outages, and we just feel that we are more than well looked after in terms of expertise and 24/7 service.”
Thank you, Mr. Brünger, for this extraordinary insight. We wish you continued success and look forward to working with you in the future!
Details at a glance
Asambeauty’s cloud environment uses the following technologies:
- 2 availability zones for fail-safe performance
- Headless approach to separate the backend and the frontend
- Autoscaling groups for scalability
- Caching proxy for external data and fail-safe performance
- Redundant AWS components for fail-safe performance
- Amazon CloudFront for better performance
- AWS WAF for increased security
The Asambeauty AWS Cloud environment
Skaylink Cloud Architect Timo explains the structure of Asambeauty’s cloud environment in more detail.
Asambeauty’s cloud environment is based on a distributed, decoupled setup across two availability zones (data centers). What is special about this setup is the headless approach, which means that only the API is used by the store backend, which is connected to the frontend (DEITY Falcon Frontend Client) via middleware (DEITY Falcon Middleware Server).
The front end, middleware and the API are mapped as “autoscaling groups”, which ensures a high degree of scalability and fail-safe performance. Another special feature is a “caching proxy”, which is used to obtain data from an external content provider and therefore compensate for a provider failure.
In addition, great importance was placed on redundancy, which means that all AWS components, wherever possible, are at least redundant and operated in an automatic fail-over mode.
To keep fail-safe performance as high as possible and reduce loading times, an Amazon CloudFront is installed in front of the entire environment, which is also coupled with an AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) to further minimize the points where the application can be attacked.
