GardenStore Elevates Digital Commerce and DevOps

GardenStore, founded in 2016, operates a digital commerce site that offers everything consumers need for their garden and outdoor spaces. The company displays a comprehensive product assortment online, featuring well-known brands at affordable prices, flexible shipping, and excellent customer service. Serving seasonal needs, GardenStore sees website traffic surge in the spring and summer to nearly 20 times the traffic seen in the fall and winter. To keep pace with seasonal demands and exponential growth, the company is continually modernizing the technologies that underpin its website. To that end, GardenStore has adopted a range of Akamai solutions that streamline developer efforts, reduce costs, and provide a better site visitor experience.

Like all seasonal businesses, GardenStore must ensure that its website can dynamically handle traffic surges without a negative impact on performance or availability. Unfortunately, the website struggled when its previous hosting platform performed unnecessary caching validation. Although the company’s skilled development team was able to tweak front- and back-end performance, it took many hours to achieve milliseconds of improvement. 

According to Roman Michak, Tech Lead for GardenStore, the company realized it couldn’t achieve the back-end performance it wanted in an affordable manner by continually tweaking core web vitals and time-to-first-byte performance. 

At the same time, GardenStore was tied to a Google Cloud hosting package that was unaffordable to the small business. Plus, although it had access to its website code, it didn’t control it.

“We got fairly far with internal tweaking but decided we would have to rebuild the entire platform to solve all our problems — and we couldn’t afford to do that in the midst of today’s economy,” says Michak. 

The first priority was to untether the company from a high degree of vendor lock-in by creating in-house teams, such as one to negotiate and own the hosting and CDN services. “We will always be tied to vendors but we need to do it in a way such that it doesn’t pose risk to our operations and business,” continues Michak.

As a next step, GardenStore decided to change its hosting arrangement so it could better leverage a more advanced CDN for higher offloads. 

The company evaluated a number of CDN providers but found most didn’t offer what GardenStore needed. Based on previous experience with Akamai solutions, GardenStore’s Chief Technology Officer championed Akamai as the right vendor to address the full breadth of the digital commerce site’s needs.

The completeness of Akamai’s toolset was the main determining factor. The combination of  Akamai App & API Protector, Image & Video Manager, Bot Manager, Edge Side Includes (ESI), and more allows the company to focus on what’s important to its business. 

Along those lines, GardenStore appreciated the benefit of hiding its URL behind Akamai’s network. “We can be less worried about security issues and intrusions that tend to hit our infrastructure, again allowing us to focus on our business rather than on patching security holes,” continues Michak.

In just over a year since signing on as an Akamai customer, GardenStore has used numerous Akamai services to its advantage. For instance, it was able to simply deploy the JavaScript associated with Image & Video Manager to use the front-end gallery instead of building the gallery from scratch. By using the bot management feature of App & API Protector, GardenStore is now able to deny all unknown bots, making it nearly impossible for bots to connect to and scrape its digital commerce site. Moreover, it is transferring all domains to Edge DNS to ensure 24/7 uptime.

“Once we gained stability and performance with Akamai, we were able to set our sights on providing more end-user–facing functionality,” says Michak. 

GardenStore’s development team continues to find ways to make use of Akamai features. For example, using just a few lines of ESI code, the team eliminated the need to maintain two versions of the login page. “This solved a massive problem of running two cache versions, while also increasing our cache hit ratio and coverage substantially. And this is just one example of the many ways we can take advantage of Akamai to design our site to work optimally,” explains Michak.

GardenStore has also benefited by using Akamai Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, for its testing and production environments. The company’s DevOps team found it incredibly simple to use. “We wrote and published a form and it worked. Having worked with numerous cloud providers — including Amazon and Google — Akamai’s simplicity is its strength and very fitting for a lean team like ours. In fact, we can integrate on the Akamai platform in one day, versus four months on the other cloud platform we use,” says Michak. 

At the same time, GardenStore appreciates the affordability of Akamai Cloud — and the inherent cost savings associated with hosting the company’s testing, staging, and production environments on it. 

Continues Michak, “During our peak season, we need more advanced functionality so we keep our environments on other platforms. But off peak, it’s quite simple to switch to Akamai and we can save significant costs while still getting support for all modern operating standards. Specifically, we achieved 80% cost savings compared to what we would have spent with hyperscalers.”  

In fact, GardenStore’s DevOps team feels free to deploy more environments because it’s so affordable to do so. As Michak explains, “Rather than continually spinning up new environments as needed, we can publish different environments with preset configurations so they’re always available when we want to test something.”

Going forward, GardenStore anticipates taking advantage of even more Akamai solutions, such as EdgeWorkers, which makes it possible to deploy JavaScript functions at the edge and create customized experiences for website visitors. “EdgeWorkers will replace what we built as microservices, providing a solid place for us to work on simple tasks that enable us to better serve our site visitors,” concludes Michak.

GardenStore is an e-commerce site that offers everything you might need for your garden or outdoor space at unbeatable prices! With a focus on being service minded, price efficient and quality driven, we are striving towards our goal of becoming the obvious choice when buying products for your garden or outdoor space. We intend to achieve that goal by offering the best and most diverse assortment online, containing well-known brands at affordable prices, flexible shipping and the best customer service in the business!