Sailsquare: migrate to cloud by optimising infrastructure

Sailsquare is a platform specialised in the search for sailing trips and holidays, which connects expert and certified sailing skippers with those who want to organise a trip or an experience on the open sea, both in Italy and abroad.

Organising a trip or a sailing holiday with children can be difficult, but with Sailsquare sailing with children is quick and easy: all you have to do is get in touch with skippers ready to go and choose one of the many sailing or catamaran experiences.

The Challenge

Like many seasonal portals, Sailsquare was facing the challenge of traffic peaks. The growing popularity during certain periods of the year led to a significant increase in user requests and server load. To address this situation, we at Claranet chose the AWS Cloud to migrate the customer's application, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the various components of the infrastructure, which is now able to handle traffic peaks resulting from promotional and television campaigns.

The solution

Solid and high-performance infrastructure

We chose to approach the project by analysing the existing architecture, to identify its core services. We then focused on their optimisation and migration to Amazon Web Service.

We preferred to use managed services, such as AWS RDS and AWS Elasticache: they allowed us to reduce management, maintenance and update activities. By reducing the TCO, we allowed the customer to save on recurring activities.

On the performance optimisation side, thanks to NewRelic APM we were able to identify the critical issues, highlighting the bottlenecks. This allowed us to improve the experience of using the platform for the end user.

By choosing to implement an IaaC (Infrastructure as a Code) solution we ensured environment parity. We used Terraform and Ansible for configuration management.

These choices allowed us to take control of the infrastructure and tailor it to AWS services, reducing recurring tasks and speeding up infrastructure changes.

The software has also been modified to take full advantage of the potential of Amazon Web Services. This has allowed us to intervene directly at all levels, from the infrastructure to the code itself.

The updated and more performant stack has improved the reliability of the architecture, ensuring a high level of security in anticipation of future evolutions.

The result

The project was a success. By replacing unnecessary manual activity with automation and offering users an intuitive tool designed to easily evolve over time according to their needs, Tannico's efficiency and effectiveness in order processing increased:

~ 15% reduction in inventory supply anomalies, e.g., clearance or stockouts (avg 1.5% error rate in 2023)
~4 hours per week saved thanks to the tool's reordering algorithms
Increased time spent on strategic initiatives (rather than repeating manual tactical tasks)
Delivery of proposals in direct relation with suppliers
Centralised order processing system that acts as a single source of truth for employees, suppliers and buyers

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