Case Study:
Padini Holdings Berhad

Malaysian apparel giant Padini Holdings Berhad modernized its IT infrastructure by partnering with G-AsiaPacific, a leading cloud consultant and deployment specialist. The transformation began with the development and hosting of their E-Commerce platform on AWS, marking their move from traditional infrastructure to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This strategic shift has positioned Padini as a frontrunner in the Malaysian apparel industry, significantly enhancing their E-Commerce capabilities. G-AsiaPacific continues to support Padini with managed services for their E-Commerce platform, ensuring ongoing performance, scalability, and reliability.

Introduction

Padini Holdings Berhad is a prominent Malaysian apparel company known for its diverse range of fashion products, catering to a wide demographic through its various brands. Established in the late 1970s, Padini started as a small-scale manufacturer and has grown into one of Malaysia’s leading retail giants, with a strong presence both in physical stores and online. The company operates multiple popular brands, including Padini, Vincci, Seed, and Miki, offering everything from casual wear to footwear and accessories. Padini’s commitment to quality, style, and affordability has made it a household name in Malaysia, and its strategic move into the E-Commerce space has further solidified its position as an industry leader.

Partner Role

G-AsiaPacific, AWS Advanced Tier Partner, played a pivotal role in advising Padini on best practices for cloud hosting, implementing the necessary AWS services, and continuously optimizing the E-Commerce platform. Their expertise ensured that Padini could seamlessly transition from a physical server infrastructure to a highly scalable and cost-effective cloud environment.

After 2 months, Padini’s E-Commerce collected enough data for G-AsiaPacific to optimize the CPU load range, allowing Padini to run its E-Commerce smoothly depending on traffic while paying only for what the application uses. Apart from some other fine-tuning carried out by G-AsiaPacific, Padini E-Commerce has been running smoothly since. Padini also subscribed to G-AsiaPacific’s annual managed services support, ensuring ongoing optimization and maintenance.

Challenge

Padini, a prominent retail brand, initially hosted its E-Commerce platform on physical servers within its own infrastructure. These servers required continuous operation 24/7 to ensure the online store remained accessible to consumers at all times. However, during peak seasons, such as holidays and special promotions, the online store experienced significant spikes in traffic, necessitating the rapid scaling of server capacity. This often required Padini to purchase additional physical servers, sometimes ranging from a single server to hundreds, depending on traffic demands. Once the peak period passed, these servers became underutilized or even idle, yet still required ongoing maintenance, including HVAC, software upgrades, security measures, and monitoring. The depreciation of server value and the risk of hardware failure further compounded the problem, making this approach unsustainable in the long run.

Initial Solution

In June 2016, Padini launched its E-Commerce platform on AWS. However, a few months after the launch, traffic surged dramatically, prompting Padini to upgrade the specifications of its single server several times. By November 11, 2016—Singles’ Day Promotion—Padini had upgraded to the highest possible specification for a single AWS server. Unfortunately, even this was insufficient to handle the massive influx of traffic.

Scalability Challenge

Recognizing the limitations of a single-server setup, G-AsiaPacific advised Padini to enable auto-scaling for their E-Commerce platform. Auto-scaling would allow the platform to automatically adjust the number of servers in response to traffic demands, ensuring optimal performance during peak times while minimizing costs during off-peak periods.

Solution Implementation

G-AsiaPacific, worked closely with Padini’s E-Commerce development partner to modernize the application. The platform was transitioned from a single-server environment to an auto-scaling environment on AWS. This move enabled Padini’s E-Commerce site to handle traffic spikes efficiently and without interruption.

As part of their ongoing digital transformation, Padini also added new workloads in 2024, including an e-Invoice system and a Supply Chain Management (SCM) system. These systems were hosted on AWS EC2 instances, with RDS Aurora used to manage their databases, ensuring high availability and performance.

To achieve this, several AWS services were utilized:

  • EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Scalable virtual servers for running the E-Commerce platform and additional workloads like the e-Invoice and SCM systems.
  • Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on traffic demand, allowing Padini’s E-Commerce platform to scale horizontally.
  • Elastic Load Balancing: Distributes incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances to maintain high availability.
  • RDS Aurora (Relational Database Service): Managed relational database for high performance and availability, supporting the E-Commerce, e-Invoice, and SCM system databases.
  • S3 (Simple Storage Service): Secure, durable, and scalable object storage for storing critical data.
  • VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): Provides an isolated network environment for secure operations.
  • CloudWatch: Monitors and manages log files, system performance, and operational health, ensuring the platform runs smoothly.
  • Global Accelerator: Enhances application availability and performance through global traffic routing.
  • WAF (Web Application Firewall): Protects the E-Commerce platform from common web exploits.

Additionally, G-AsiaPacific optimized the CPU load range, allowing Padini to run its E-Commerce platform smoothly based on real-time traffic, ensuring that Padini only pays for the resources the application uses. Further fine-tuning by G-AsiaPacific contributed to the platform’s enhanced performance.

Outcome

With the implementation of AWS’s auto-scaling capabilities and other services, Padini’s E-Commerce platform now dynamically scales to meet traffic demands, ensuring a seamless shopping experience for customers even during peak periods like Singles’ Day. The inclusion of the e-Invoice and SCM systems within the AWS environment has further streamlined Padini’s operations, enhancing efficiency across the board.

Furthermore, Padini subscribed to G-AsiaPacific’s annual managed services support, ensuring ongoing optimization and maintenance. Since the migration and optimization, Padini’s E-Commerce platform has been running smoothly, providing a robust foundation for future growth.

Testimonial

Thank you to G-AsiaPacific for the responsive and professional support which has allowed us to develop with agility

When we decided to go digital, G-AsiaPacific came in with sound advice on leveraging with cloud. The team worked well in crafting a solution plan for our E-Commerce website to be scalable and powerful enough to cope with incoming traffic. The auto-scaling environment has given a compelling shopping experience to our online customers. Whether it is our E-mail, E-Commerce hosting or loyalty system, G-AsiaPacific has displayed strong cloud IT expertise as well as dedication in managing their support and services. Thank you to G-AsiaPacific for the responsive and professional support which has allowed us to develop with agility.

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