Smartlab Delivers with Tidal
SmartLab is a retailer of smart phone repair services based in the Northern Territory, Australia. Smartlab repairs all makes and models of Phone, tablets, smart devices, computer and laptops, data recovery, refurbished phones, accessories. The company is rated as one of the top phone repair service providers in the city on Google because of their customer service, speed, and knowledge. Smartlab wants to retain their reputation as the city’s go-to smart device repair shop. Maintaining a secure and low-cost website that customers can visit to contact Smartlab or find relevant information is one of the ways the business can retain and even strengthen its reputation.
The Challenge
The SmartLab website was originally built on WordPress as it is a platform that is easy to use and has many popular features and capabilities. Over time, the website had become cumbersome and expensive to update and to maintain. This maintenance issue was expected to continue and accelerate in effort and cost over time.
Also, the contract with the current site hosting provider was coming to a close.
In addition, there were security concerns due to the nature of the WordPress framework used for the original site.
The Solution
After analyzing the existing site with the Tidal software platform and identifying the workloads, dependencies and source code, it was recommended to migrate the website to Amazon Web Services while modernizing the application to use a lightweight static headless CMS (Content Management System). The content doesn’t have to be recreated each time someone accesses the website as is necessary in WordPress (which utilizes PHP code) thus making the site more performant.
The Details
It was recommended that the DNS infrastructure be migrated to AWS and the proposed architecture supported backup and disaster recovery for increased peace of mind.
A replatform approach was taken, moving the site to the AWS Lightsail, migrating DNS to Route 53, leveraging the AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) and CloudFront for content distribution.
Smartlab architecture
The Results
Using Tidal’s transformative approach, Smartlab was able to become more secure, lightweight (easy to maintain), resilient, performant and scalable.Generating a static version of the site and limiting access to potentially vulnerable CMS and its plugins reduced the attack surface. Content delivery is also much faster because the customer-facing site is all static HTML and Javascript. By leveraging Availability Zones and horizontal scaling, they were able to distribute the traffic increasing the site’s availability and fault tolerance.
In addition, they saw a 95% reduction on their monthly spend.
About Tidal
Built by AWS experts, on AWS. We are an AWS Validated Software partner and listed on AWS Marketplace. Our customers get access to multiple AWS funding programs using Tidal. Our cloud readiness assessment and 6R migration strategies complement requirements documented within the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).