GOStack, in partnership with Dlabs, helped The Business of Fashion (BoF) modernise their development practices by building a fully autonomous, self-service platform on AWS. The new infrastructure, built on Amazon EKS, RDS, and serverless technologies, enabled BoF to accelerate their development lifecycle, improve security, and empower their engineering teams to innovate faster.
OVERVIEW
Information
- Client: The Business of Fashion (BoF)
- Industry: Media, Publishing, Fashion, Technology
- Project Type: DevOps Transformation, Platform Modernisation
- Services: Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD, GitOps, Containerisation, Security
Intro
The Business of Fashion is the definitive source of intelligence, analysis, and advice for the $2.5 trillion global fashion industry. Serving a community of millions in more than 125 countries, BoF provides agenda-setting journalism, career resources, and immersive events. To maintain its position as a leading digital authority, BoF’s technology platform must be agile, scalable, and secure, enabling its teams to deliver new products and features at speed.
BoF engaged GOStack, in partnership with their existing product development partner Dlabs, to overhaul their development infrastructure and practices. The goal was to move away from manual processes and create a modern, self-service platform that would empower developers and accelerate the pace of innovation.
The Challenge
BoF’s existing development workflow was facing several bottlenecks that hindered their ability to move quickly. The infrastructure lacked automation, requiring significant manual effort for provisioning, deployments, and environment management. This created dependencies on a small group of engineers, slowed down the development cycle, and made it difficult to scale operations efficiently. Key challenges included:
- Manual Deployment Processes: Deployments were time-consuming and prone to human error, limiting the frequency of releases and the team’s ability to respond quickly to business needs.
- Lack of Developer Autonomy: Engineers had to wait for infrastructure specialists to provision resources or set up new environments, creating a significant bottleneck in the development lifecycle.
- Inconsistent Environments: Differences between development, staging, and production environments led to unexpected issues and made it difficult to test changes reliably.
- Scalability and Security Concerns: The existing setup was not designed to handle the scale and security requirements of a leading global media platform, posing a risk to future growth and stability.
Our Solution
Working in close collaboration with Dlabs, GOStack designed and implemented a fully autonomous, self-service development platform on AWS, built on the principles of DevOps, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code.
Containerisation and Orchestration with Amazon EKS: The core of the new platform is Amazon EKS, which provides a scalable and resilient foundation for running BoF’s containerised applications. By dockerizing the applications, we created portable and consistent artifacts that could be deployed reliably across any environment.
Automated CI/CD and GitOps: We established a modern CI/CD pipeline that fully automated the build, test, and deployment process. Using GitOps principles, the state of the infrastructure is declared in Git, making it the single source of truth. Any change to the Git repository automatically triggers a deployment, ensuring that the live environment always reflects the desired state. This removed manual intervention and enabled developers to deploy code safely and frequently.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The entire AWS infrastructure was defined as code using tools like Terraform. This approach ensures that all environments are provisioned consistently and can be recreated on demand. IaC provides full visibility into the infrastructure setup and allows for versioning, peer review, and automated testing of infrastructure changes.
Scalable and Secure AWS Services: The platform leverages a suite of managed AWS services to ensure scalability, reliability, and security. Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon DynamoDB provide scalable database solutions, while AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway are used to build serverless components that are cost-efficient and easy to manage.
Results and Benefits
The new self-service development platform transformed how The Business of Fashion builds and delivers software.
- Improved Developer Productivity: With a fully automated and self-service platform, developers can now provision environments, deploy code, and iterate on features without waiting for assistance. This autonomy has significantly accelerated the development lifecycle.
- Faster Time-to-Market: Automated CI/CD pipelines enable BoF to release new features and updates much more frequently, allowing them to respond faster to market trends and user feedback.
- Enhanced System Stability and Security: Infrastructure as Code and consistent environments have reduced the risk of configuration drift and deployment errors. The use of managed AWS services and modern security practices has strengthened the overall security posture of the platform.
- Enabled Self-Service Culture: The new platform has fostered a culture of ownership and empowerment within the engineering team, enabling them to operate more independently and focus on creating value for the business.
Transformation Impact
By embracing modern DevOps practices and building a self-service platform on AWS, The Business of Fashion has created a powerful engine for innovation. The partnership between BoF, Dlabs, and GOStack has resulted in a technology foundation that is not only scalable and secure but also empowers developers to do their best work. This transformation allows BoF to continue leading the conversation in the global fashion industry, backed by a platform that can keep pace with their ambition.
About GOStack
GOStack is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specialising in platform modernisation, DevOps, GitOps and data analytics on AWS. We help technology companies build and run modern, scalable and cost-efficient cloud platforms. We also embed the engineering practices that make those platforms sustainable long-term.
Why Partner with Us for Cloud Migration?
Building a true self-service development platform requires more than just tools; it requires a shift in culture and practices. We specialise in leading these transformations, working with your teams to implement the automation, infrastructure, and workflows that enable developer autonomy and accelerate innovation. If you’re ready to remove development bottlenecks and empower your teams, let’s talk. Contact us to architect for success.
