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Utilising AWS for Sime Darby Auto ConneXion (Ford Malaysia) E-Commerce Site
About Sime Darby Auto ConneXion (Ford Malaysia)
Sime Darby Auto Connexion (Ford Malaysia) has dealerships and outlets at various strategic locations spread throughout Malaysia. Ford established its presence in Malaysia in 1926 and began assembly operations in Singapore after 4 years. It then incorporated Ford Motor Company of Malaya in 1972. In 1981, a 49% stake was sole to Pernas Sime Darby in response to Malaysia’s New Economic Policy. Currently, the team at Ford Malaysia is focused on digitising it’s business with e-commerce being one of its main priorities.
The Challenge
In 2019, the Ford Malaysia team had decided they needed a digital marketing campaign through e-commerce to maintain/improve market share and attract more brand awareness. As Ford Malaysia would be one of firsts in the industry to implement an e-commerce site, the team needed us to launch a platform which would be available and responsive 24 hours a day, seven days a week all while being cost-effective.
The Solution
In order to do that, we turned to AWS to reduce downtime to almost zero for its e-commerce clients and to scale up and down only when needed to manage cost.
We built the site and CMS using the AWS Auto-Scaling service to auto scale the EC2 (computer engine) horizontally. We also utilized AWS S3 and Cloudfront to reduce the load from the web servers by storing static content in S3 and cache it on AWS CDN - Cloudfront.
We also deployed the ELB to distribute the incoming traffic across the EC2 instances and deployed the web servers in different availability zones. To improve the performance and efficiency of the platform, we added read replicas to the RDS (DB). This will take the load off the write master database. To further reduce the webserver load, we cache some content in the AWS Elasticache.