Case study

Unlocking 500% Ecommerce Growth with Cloud Modernization



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The Problem

The retailer’s legacy ecommerce platform was a bottleneck to growth. Key issues included:

  • Poor reliability: Uptime averaged only 88%, resulting in frequent outages and lost revenue.
  • Slow performance: Page load times averaged 18 seconds, driving high customer abandonment.
  • Escalating costs: Hardware, colocation, and maintenance were costing ~$25,000 per month.
  • Revenue ceiling: Online sales had plateaued, far below the company’s potential market share.

The business needed a modern, scalable, and cost-effective platform to stabilize operations, improve customer experience, and drive sales growth.


The internet is still a fad that will never work, but at least it is making us money now. 

— A 

(Fractional CTO Leadership)

The Approach

As the Fractional CTO, I led the company through a complete ecommerce platform transformation and modernization by moving from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-native architecture on Microsoft Azure.

Key steps included:

  1. Cloud Architecture & Planning
    • Designed a high-availability Azure architecture with global load balancing and DDoS protection.
    • Implemented auto-scaling to handle traffic surges during promotions and peak shopping seasons.
  2. Platform Modernization
    • Refactored legacy ecommerce code for cloud compatibility.
    • Introduced Azure Cache for Redis to accelerate page loads.
    • Built a CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps for seamless, zero-downtime deployments.
  3. Performance & Reliability Enhancements
    • Integrated Azure Application Insights for real-time monitoring.
    • Optimized CDN caching, reducing first-page load time from 18 seconds to under 2.5 seconds globally.
    • Achieved a 99.99% uptime SLA through redundant regions and failover strategies.
  4. Cost Optimization
    • Retired all physical hardware and colocation expenses.
    • Right-sized cloud resources, reducing monthly hosting spend from $25,000 to ~$1,200.

The solution


A+. 

— A