Zalora Boosts Site Performance by 46% by Migrating its Content Delivery Network to AWS

For more than a decade, Zalora has provided fashion-savvy customers with a wide variety of popular brands shipped direct to their door. Zalora is a fashion and lifestyle ecommerce retailer in Southeast Asia, serving six national markets. As a customer-first brand, Zalora is constantly seeking new ways to improve its shopping experience. For years, Zalora has run its customer-facing IT architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS), valuing the agility and scalability of the platform.

As part of Zalora’s transition to a more sustainable business model following the pandemic, the business decided to reevaluate and streamline its technology stack. Recognizing the need for cost reduction, Zalora chose to optimize its third-party content delivery network (CDN). It sought a more cost-effective CDN that could offer a better price-to-performance ratio and easier customization. Zalora’s leaders knew migrating its CDN to the cloud would save costs and improve performance, but the company only had two weeks to migrate because of an expiring contract with its previous CDN provider.

As a long-standing customer of AWS Enterprise Support, Zalora consulted with AWS about testing Amazon CloudFront as a low-latency CDN. Key migration goals were lower cost, higher availability, and improved site response times. Particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines—where it has customers across thousands of islands—Zalora wanted to at least maintain site latency for website views and transactions.

With Zalora’s previous CDN provider, it was difficult to evaluate and procure new services because of the administrative and paperwork burden required to make changes. In contrast, Amazon CloudFront offered the opportunity to immediately start testing with no upfront commitment. Kenichi Otsuka, director of site reliability engineering at Zalora, ran a proof of concept (POC) comparing Amazon CloudFront to the incumbent CDN and another cloud CDN provider. “With Amazon CloudFront, response time analyses from each of the six Southeast Asian countries we operate in showed lower response times,” he confirms.

Satisfied with the performance of Amazon CloudFront after two POCs, Zalora signed a multi-year contract with AWS. The company also received dedicated support from the AWS Professional Services team, solution architects, technical account managers, and specialists, with a daily stand-up meeting to ensure migration success within its two-week timeline.

In addition to Amazon CloudFront, Zalora implemented AWS WAF to protect its web applications and Amazon Route 53 as a highly available domain name system (DNS) web service. The company uses AWS Shield Advanced, a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. Using Amazon CloudFront also provides the convenience of using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for public-facing SSL certificates without going through a lengthy procurement process. Otsuka says, “We optimized infrastructure configuration management in Terraform for AWS, which covers Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, Amazon Route53, and even SSL certificates.”

The migration to Amazon CloudFront led to a 49 percent cost reduction for Zalora. In particular, the company now saves thousands of dollars each month on data transfer expenses, because Amazon CloudFront does not impose charges for data transfer out from AWS origins. Zalora also benefits from the pay-as-you-go pricing model of Amazon CloudFront, which aligns well with its business model as an online retailer with fluctuating traffic patterns, including peak shopping periods like 11.11.

Migration to AWS has also reduced operational overhead. With its CDN, firewall, and DNS centralized on AWS, Zalora has streamlined operations for easier management and oversight. Engineers can manage Zalora’s CDN through the same dashboard and control center from which they manage other aspects of Zalora’s IT infrastructure, boosting IT efficiency. Otsuka says, “Switching to Amazon CloudFront streamlined operations and boosted network performance.”

The company has also achieved lower latency, with response times being 46 percent faster on average. Even in multi-island countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, which had the strongest latency concerns, system response times have improved by 11 percent and 23 percent, respectively. Amazon CloudFront uses more than 550 points of presence that AWS maintains throughout the globe to ensure low latency for customers abroad.