Flixmedia: Transforming E-commerce Infrastructure for Global Scale

About Flixmedia

Flixmedia is a leading innovator in enhancing the shopping experience by connecting brands and retailers more closely with their customers. Through its cloud-based content syndication platform, Flixmedia operates around the clock to support millions of product pages across over a thousand retailers in more than 90 countries. By leveraging data and advanced technologies, Flixmedia empowers brands to deliver a more informed and engaging shopping journey.

Introduction: Meeting the Demands of Global E-commerce

A Growing Need for Scalable Infrastructure

As consumer spending continues to rise year after year, Flixmedia has become a critical partner for the world’s leading retail brands. The company is called upon to supercharge buying journeys, enhance the shopper experience, and process billions of data points in real-time, all at a massive scale. To support these critical growth trajectories, Flixmedia required a technology infrastructure that could scale instantly, enable powerful self-service management, reduce operational complexity, and maintain cost efficiency as a core principle.

In an industry where Flixmedia plays a pivotal role in commerce, challenges related to scaling up platform and product capabilities aren’t just theoretical concerns—they’re business-critical factors that can limit growth if not addressed effectively.

The Making of a Transformation: Migrating to the Cloud

Strategic Cloud Migration

The decision to migrate Flixmedia’s entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) was straightforward; however, executing the transition while maintaining business continuity and embracing the operational transformation required careful and strategic planning. Flixmedia faced one of the largest and most layered data sets Spicy Mango had ever encountered, stretching into petabytes, with applications spanning hundreds of unique services that needed re-architecture and redevelopment.

Building for Scalability and Simplicity

Chris Wood, CTO at Spicy Mango, remarked on the complexity of the transformation: "The technical aspects of the transformation were going to be complex enough on their own. We forced our project teams to wipe the canvas clean and think carefully to prevent a migration of legacy that would significantly hinder how we wanted services to operate and scale in the cloud. While more groundwork was needed, we actually simplified operations significantly through a self-healing approach. We didn't want the Flixmedia teams to have to intervene—the technology should recognise where things are going awry and do something about it."

This approach involved rethinking the architecture to embrace microservices, allowing for both horizontal and vertical scaling principles to be fully leveraged. The goal was to create a platform that could not only scale effortlessly but also simplify operations, reducing the need for manual intervention through automation and self-healing capabilities.

Operational Excellence: Crafting a Cloud-Optimised Strategy

Maximising the Benefits of Cloud

While many teams focus on the scalability, performance, and reliability aspects of cloud infrastructure, the true value for a business comes from a carefully crafted operational strategy. Spicy Mango’s approach to Flixmedia’s cloud migration was not just about moving to the cloud but about optimising the operational model to extract maximum value from cloud resources.

By introducing the perfect blend of alerting, notifications, and leveraging the full capabilities of the cloud, the migration accelerated Flixmedia’s journey towards reducing operational costs, overheads, and complexity. This was achieved through self-healing mechanisms and lite-touch operational principles, which ensured that the platform could operate smoothly with minimal manual oversight.

There’s Scale, and Then There’s Black Friday Scale

Delivering Unprecedented Scalability

Flixmedia’s technology plays a crucial role in helping brands and retailers sell over £400 million GBP worth of stock to consumers within a single 24-hour period, operating at an extraordinary 45,000 requests per minute at peak times. To support this, the technology platform had to be not only scalable but capable of scaling with immediacy and robustness.

Spicy Mango’s engineering teams delivered a highly resilient, auto-scaling solution that could handle these intense demands with a level of immediacy previously unseen. To ensure cost management, the platform was designed with an equally critical focus on scale-in, perfectly balancing performance and throughput with the need to optimise cloud spending during peak periods like Black Friday.

Reaping the Rewards: A Future-Proof Platform for Growth

Enabling Long-Term Strategic Growth

The result of this transformation is that Flixmedia now operates on a self-service, highly available, and resilient technology platform that not only supports current demands but is also built to drive business growth for the next decade. With a solid technological foundation in place, Flixmedia is well-positioned to pursue its strategic ambitions, confident that its infrastructure can scale and adapt as needed to meet the evolving needs of global e-commerce.

Confidence in the Future

Spicy Mango has provided Flixmedia with more than just a platform; it has delivered confidence. The confidence to know that their technology infrastructure will support their strategic goals, even as they continue to innovate and expand. This transformation ensures that Flixmedia can continue to be a critical component in the global commerce ecosystem, delivering world-class shopper experiences across the globe.

Navigating the Challenges of Global E-commerce

Scaling for Peak Demand

One of the primary challenges in global e-commerce is the ability to scale rapidly to meet peak demands, such as those seen during Black Friday. Spicy Mango’s solution for Flixmedia was designed with this challenge in mind, ensuring that the platform could handle massive spikes in traffic without compromising performance or reliability.

Optimising for Cost and Performance

Balancing cost and performance is another critical aspect of managing a global e-commerce platform. By implementing an auto-scaling solution with intelligent scale-in capabilities, Spicy Mango ensured that Flixmedia could optimise its cloud spend while maintaining high levels of performance, even during the most demanding periods.

Simplifying Operations in the Cloud

The migration to AWS wasn’t just about moving infrastructure—it was about transforming operations to be more efficient and less complex. By embracing automation and self-healing principles, Spicy Mango helped Flixmedia reduce the operational burden on its teams, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth rather than day-to-day maintenance.

Flixmedia’s Digital Success Story

Through careful planning, innovative architecture, and seamless execution, Flixmedia, with the support of Spicy Mango, has successfully transformed its technology infrastructure to meet the demands of global e-commerce. This project not only addressed the immediate challenges of scaling and operational complexity but also laid the groundwork for long-term success. The collaboration between Flixmedia and Spicy Mango is a testament to the power of cloud technology in driving business growth, ensuring that Flixmedia can continue to deliver exceptional shopper experiences to millions of consumers worldwide.