Bacardi’s digital portfolio consists of over 150 websites and 2,500 web domains, making it essential to offer a consistent and engaging digital presence for their customers

The company’s challenge was to expand their digital footprint and deliver innovative connected experiences to consumers while keeping costs under control. Bacardi turned to EPAM as a trusted partner to help realize the full potential of their platform, ensuring the company could quickly adapt to future consumer needs and continue to provide exceptional brand experiences. Bacardi and EPAM worked to improve brand consistency and perception, accelerate time to market and deliver significant operational cost savings. By collaborating together, EPAM helped Bacardi transform their environment and implement a DevOps automation platform, resulting in 16 times greater website deployment capacity and a 42% reduction in infrastructure costs.

Key Challenges

While the purpose of Bacardi’s Digital Marketing Platform was to produce a set of services that could be reused across brands to lower costs and reduce time to market for individual brands, the solution was not being used to its full potential. The platform had many manual deployment processes that were prone to errors, resulting in significant overhead, critical availability issues and bottlenecks.

Because each website had its own separate component and set-up, deployments were executed in silos, making automation challenging at scale. This results in engineers spending a significant amount of time on operational requests rather than optimization and innovation.

Solution Highlights

EPAM worked with Bacardi to implement an end-to-end, automated DevOps platform built on AWS. The solution included:

• Blue-green deployments, automated smoke testing and pre-production environments to ensure zero downtime
• Amazon CloudFront as the standardized CDN for all websites, enforced website integration with Amazon S3 and a caching strategy to allow websites to run quickly
• An optimized cloud architecture and processes to increase infrastructure costs
• A custom-built digital asset inventory that automatically pulls all digital assets into a single view for increased portfolio visibility

The Results

• 99.5% availability and a 128x faster onboarding of new websites from 8 days to 20 minutes
• 16x higher deployment capacity from 12 to 200 deployments per week
• 35x faster website performance
• 42% reduction in hosting infrastructure costs
• Decreased time spent on operational request and manual operations from 90% to 10%
• Inventory of digital assets are automatically updated

October 2019, Bacardi and EPAM were awarded the Best Overall DevOps Project in Retail at the DevOps Industry Awards in London.

Technologies used

• HEAR FROM THE CUSTOMER

Sheryl Richardson
Digital Marketing Operations Manager, Bacardi