Lush chooses Google Cloud Platform for their eCommerce sites

Founded in 1994, handmade cosmetics company Lush is headquartered in Poole, England, with offices in 52 countries and 900 stores worldwide. The company has ten manufacturing sites and several head office locations in Poole and London.

When I first set the engineering team the challenge of migrating to Google Cloud, we had around 22 days. This decision was for stability, maintenance, cost and to align more with our long term ethics. With our busiest trading period in full flow, I think the team thought I was crazy. Every single person gave 100% to get the job done.

Jack Constantine, Chief Digital Officer

Lush

About the project

Previously, Lush were contracted to a fully managed service covering application, databases and server platform. The solution was both costly and gave them limited scope to control the constituent parts. They wanted to manage the application layers themselves and continue to use cloud hosting services as the server and database platform.

Then

Suite of eCommerce sites made of multiple groups of Drupal based applications powering 17 separate Lush websites across the world.
Use of a hosting platform with Acquia
The migration project was split into two key areas – infrastructure and data – and completed in just 22 days.
First, creation of an entirely new infrastructure of web servers, database servers, load balancers etc.
Second, actual migration of data and code. The databases had to be downloaded from Acquia into Google Cloud Storage and then manually restored into Google Cloud SQL instances.

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Now

Moving from PaaS (Platform as a Service) to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) aligns with their technology goals and their guiding ethics including Ethical Data, Open Source and Ethical Hardware.
40% reduction in hosting costs
Additional benefit is that Google Cloud is 100% powered by renewable energy sources
The next phase is to optimise the infrastructure and move the architecture from Google Compute Engine over to Google Container Engine (GKE). Their goal is to make the most of containers, kubernetes and move to a service orientated architecture.

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