Minted Migrates to AWS Cloud for Increased Agility, Scalability, and Reliability

Executive Summary

Minted is an online marketplace for independent artists. Connecting a global creative community directly to consumers, Minted uses technology that enables products to be shared by independent artists who typically lack access to traditional retail outlets. Enabling everyone from seasoned illustrators to first-timers participating in a design competition, Minted’s community focus allows artists to learn, gain exposure, and build a business.

Products available on Minted include works of art, home decor, and stationery created by independent artists and designers spread across all 50 states and 96 different countries. Minted’s community members share a deep love of creative expression, personal development, risk-taking, and most importantly, paying it forward by helping each other.

The Challenge

Minted had a hybrid setup with core production infrastructure hosted in Rackspace, and most peripheral services on AWS. The Rackspace cloud was cumbersome to maintain, and the dual environment resulted in significant operational complexities around deployment and testing. It became clear that Rackspace was not going to be able to scale to meet Minted’s need in 2019.

Minted sought to migrate their workload to AWS for increased agility, scalability, and reliability. The company’s user traffic is seasonal with large spikes during Q4, and the migration must be completed prior to the busy holiday season. They were looking to ease peak traffic bottlenecks and increase scalability by taking advantage of AWS Cloud Services.

The ClearScale Solution

Minted approached ClearScale for migration guidance and also to plan and build its equivalent production network infrastructures at AWS Cloud using Terraform. ClearScale proposed a highly secure VPC layout and helped build Terraform modules for its multiple VPCs and its peering connections. ClearScale, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, worked with AWS and Minted to help create presentations and business case data to push the initiative through the Minted leadership team.

In addition, to help streamline the deployment process for existing peripheral services already on AWS, ClearScale automated the server infrastructure provisioning for AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK).

Minted’s database infrastructure was strengthened using Amazon Aurora Database Services, a cost-efficient and scalable relational database service, a fully managed, multi-region, highly secure non-relational database. The ClearScale team built Terraform modules to bring up aurora infrastructure and also worked with the Minted team to migrate its data to Aurora-DB.

The project was a collaborative team effort where ClearScale worked on network infrastructure, AWS Services provisioning and the Minted Team worked on applications, deployment, QA, testing, and finally migration.

Architecture Diagram

The Benefits

The migration to AWS Cloud delivered Minted’s desired high availability and scalability, enabling the company to adjust their capacity needs during periods of high demand without added effort. AWS Cloud also includes multi-region backup and disaster recovery capabilities, protecting crucial user data from potential harm or loss. Advanced access management automates and simplifies common tasks, including patch management and change requests.

Partnering with ClearScale empowered Minted to take control over its infrastructure. By migrating the bulk of its services to AWS, Minted is better equipped to handle its busy Q4 traffic and adjust capacity on the fly. The high availability of AWS protects Minted from unexpected downtime. For its dedicated community of artists and designers, higher performance and improved reliability allow Minted artisans to keep their businesses running. By working together, side by side, ClearScale and Minted were able to migrate their large production workload to AWS efficiently and effectively.