Fastly Case Studies Dunelm's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Ecommerce Speed and Security with Fastly

	Dunelm's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Ecommerce Speed and Security with Fastly Fastly

Dunelm's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Ecommerce Speed and Security with Fastly

Fastly

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries	Construction & Infrastructure Transportation
Applicable Functions	Logistics & Transportation Product Research & Development
Use Cases	Last Mile Delivery Traffic Monitoring
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services System Integration
Challenge	Dunelm, one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K., was facing challenges with its ecommerce platform. The company, which offers hundreds of thousands of products online and operates over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores, was looking to support a major digital transformation initiative. The goal was to increase speed for their shoppers across web and mobile storefronts, enhance security, deliver site updates faster at scale, and augment an infrastructure-as-code strategy. In early 2017, Dunelm undertook a major re-platforming initiative that would allow engineering teams to leverage the many advantages of cloud technologies. However, during the new stack rollout, a major incident occurred which affected their Google Product Listings Advertisements, impacting the team’s ability to sell products on their new platform. Read More
About Customer	Dunelm is one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K. The company offers hundreds of thousands of products on their ecommerce site as well as over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores across the country. Dunelm also operates its own home delivery system and maintains a nationwide fleet of delivery trucks. To keep the business running smoothly, over 200 engineers build and manage a portfolio of applications, including a robust ecommerce site and a suite of internal tools. Dunelm’s engineering organization is split into small, autonomous teams based in the U.K. and Portugal. The platform team is a shared service that provides DevOps, automation, site reliability, tooling, infrastructure, as well as other services that they rely on. Read More
Solution	To address these challenges, Dunelm switched to Fastly, a modern content delivery network. The new headless and serverless platform, with API-driven and microservices architecture, was rolled out in October 2019. To align with their new infrastructure-as-code strategy, the platform team sought to consolidate content delivery, with the goals enabling the wider engineering organization to be more agile and responsive to business needs. During the new stack rollout, the team decided to route 100% of traffic through Fastly right away. Fastly’s edge computing technology is highly configurable and enables Dunelm teams to harness the power of the edge to deliver innovative and personalized customer experiences. Fastly’s platform simplifies management of content delivery in one unified place, which standardizes CDN services across the organization and improves collaboration. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Construction & Infrastructure

Transportation

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation

Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Last Mile Delivery

Traffic Monitoring

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

System Integration

Challenge

Dunelm, one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K., was facing challenges with its ecommerce platform. The company, which offers hundreds of thousands of products online and operates over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores, was looking to support a major digital transformation initiative. The goal was to increase speed for their shoppers across web and mobile storefronts, enhance security, deliver site updates faster at scale, and augment an infrastructure-as-code strategy. In early 2017, Dunelm undertook a major re-platforming initiative that would allow engineering teams to leverage the many advantages of cloud technologies. However, during the new stack rollout, a major incident occurred which affected their Google Product Listings Advertisements, impacting the team’s ability to sell products on their new platform.

About Customer

Dunelm is one of the largest home furnishings and accessory retailers in the U.K. The company offers hundreds of thousands of products on their ecommerce site as well as over 170 brick-and-mortar superstores across the country. Dunelm also operates its own home delivery system and maintains a nationwide fleet of delivery trucks. To keep the business running smoothly, over 200 engineers build and manage a portfolio of applications, including a robust ecommerce site and a suite of internal tools. Dunelm’s engineering organization is split into small, autonomous teams based in the U.K. and Portugal. The platform team is a shared service that provides DevOps, automation, site reliability, tooling, infrastructure, as well as other services that they rely on.

Solution

To address these challenges, Dunelm switched to Fastly, a modern content delivery network. The new headless and serverless platform, with API-driven and microservices architecture, was rolled out in October 2019. To align with their new infrastructure-as-code strategy, the platform team sought to consolidate content delivery, with the goals enabling the wider engineering organization to be more agile and responsive to business needs. During the new stack rollout, the team decided to route 100% of traffic through Fastly right away. Fastly’s edge computing technology is highly configurable and enables Dunelm teams to harness the power of the edge to deliver innovative and personalized customer experiences. Fastly’s platform simplifies management of content delivery in one unified place, which standardizes CDN services across the organization and improves collaboration.

Impact #1	The switch to Fastly has had a significant impact on Dunelm's operations. The switch itself was a simple DNS change, but the impact was immediate — products started appearing on Google Product Listings again, and over the following days everything was back to normal. All of their traffic is now going through Fastly, including images. Fastly’s technical support team was on hand to help everything go smoothly. They were present in the dedicated project Slack channel to answer questions in minutes, and they also assisted the Dunelm team with log monitoring to help spot and troubleshoot issues. Implementing Fastly has enabled them to more effectively support teams throughout the development cycle with data and insights that help drive better decisions. They configured Fastly’s real-time log streaming to send logs in a format readable by Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics solution, which gives them greater visibility into website performance and potential issues.

Impact #1

The switch to Fastly has had a significant impact on Dunelm's operations. The switch itself was a simple DNS change, but the impact was immediate — products started appearing on Google Product Listings again, and over the following days everything was back to normal. All of their traffic is now going through Fastly, including images. Fastly’s technical support team was on hand to help everything go smoothly. They were present in the dedicated project Slack channel to answer questions in minutes, and they also assisted the Dunelm team with log monitoring to help spot and troubleshoot issues. Implementing Fastly has enabled them to more effectively support teams throughout the development cycle with data and insights that help drive better decisions. They configured Fastly’s real-time log streaming to send logs in a format readable by Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics solution, which gives them greater visibility into website performance and potential issues.

Benefit #1	978% improvement in page load speed on their homepage
Benefit #2	23% increase in basket performance
Benefit #3	200x increase in deployments

Benefit #1

978% improvement in page load speed on their homepage

Benefit #2

23% increase in basket performance

Benefit #3

200x increase in deployments

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Overview

Dunelm's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Ecommerce Speed and Security with Fastly

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit