AWS services enabled Tata CLiQ to reinvent its operations for an enhanced experience

Challenges

Tata CLiQ is a platform from a Tata Group business venture, Tata Unistore, which was launched in 2016 as an online marketplace for brand-loving consumers. The marketplace connects customers with over 1,200 local and international brands across categories including fashion, electronics, and footwear. The platform also launched its premium and luxury lifestyle destination, Tata CLiQ Luxury, to cater to consumers who focus on quality and craftsmanship. 

During its initial years of operation, Tata CLiQ used a private cloud to run its infrastructure. However, reliability and scalability were major challenges, which led to persistent inefficiencies. Internal teams had to manually monitor infrastructure 24/7 to quickly remediate system issues. During peak sales periods, they often had to scale up infrastructure three to four times higher than what the business projected to avoid losing sales or risking damage to the company’s reputation.  

To boost efficiency, Tata CLiQ decided to migrate to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The decision was based on a compelling proposal from the AWS team as well as Tata CLiQ’s leadership team’s experience with AWS.

Initiatives

Tata CLiQ’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications were among the first workloads that migrated to AWS. For its customer care operations, the company uses SAP ECC, which is integrated with the Tata CLiQ marketplace. The operation also relies on SAP hybris as a mission-critical component.

 Before migrating to AWS, Tata CLiQ faced teething challenges in ensuring sufficient capacity of its SAP hybris nodes to handle peak traffic during sale periods. Its Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC), which stores more than 30 TB of data, was also subjected to frequent downtime. Since then, the business uses Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle and SAP on AWS, both of which feature automation tooling to scale on demand. 

After resolving its stability challenges, Tata CLiQ began a cost optimization journey on the AWS Cloud. AWS led deep-dive sessions to identify idle and underutilized resources, followed by right-sizing across all resources including database instances, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes.

Results

Visibility into security and system operations has also improved since migrating to AWS. TCL and AWS guided a detailed security baseline review of Tata CLiQ’s environment, recommending changes to access controls and logging, in addition to enhanced tracking metrics. By removing the need to manually monitor security and instances during scaling, Tata CLiQ has empowered its teams to innovate and enhance site features.