zulily Selects AWS for the Vast Majority of its Cloud Infrastructure

Business Wire 12-Jun-2018 8:59 AM

Leading online retailer moved to AWS for greater stability, flexibility, and cost savings, and to drive innovation at a faster clip

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that online retailer zulily is moving its infrastructure to AWS to further enhance the online shopping experience for its more than 6.1 million active customers. zulily moved business critical workloads to AWS, including its store, mobile application, and supply chain, and the online retailer has since seen a 30-40 percent performance improvement per request made across its website and mobile application. In addition, many of zulily's core production databases have been upgraded to Amazon Aurora, resulting in higher fault tolerance and better performance for zulily customers.

zulily is using the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, serverless, and analytics, to continually enhance its services in the cloud. AWS enables every part of the business—marketing, merchandising, vendor operations, security, CI/CD automation, and supply chain—to make real-time decisions and continuous improvements. By moving from standalone image generation servers running custom code and several terabytes of local storage to a single Lambda function backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and fronted by Amazon CloudFront, zulily created a truly scalable architecture on top of AWS that saves the company thousands of dollars a month on a critical system, and delivered the performance needed to provide shoppers with a reliable and delightful experience. zulily developed a DevOps practice on AWS, enabling the team to push code multiple times a day across a variety of applications and services, testing and verifying system functionalities every five minutes and cutting down the code-to-production push time by over 30 percent.

"zulily launches over 100 events a day, featuring 9,000 styles for 72 hours—while holding minimal inventory—and serving a personalized experience for every customer, which requires a cloud provider that can meet our rigorous demands. We chose AWS for the flexibility, stability, cost savings, and unmatched set of cloud services that support our unique business model," said Luke Friang, Chief Information Officer at zulily. "With AWS's highly scalable and flexible infrastructure, zulily is able to store and analyze large volumes of data and deliver enhanced experience to customers without taking away from key business operations. Our strategic relationship with AWS gives our team the tools they need to maintain our culture of constant and nimble innovation."

"Leading retailers like zulily want to use the technology infrastructure platform that gives them the most functionality, the greatest agility, and the best security and performance to underpin their customers' online and mobile shopping experiences," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "AWS is the clear leader in these areas and with zulily launching over 100 events a day, they can now rely on the most comprehensive set of cloud services to iterate, test, and deploy new services at an accelerated pace to create even better customer experiences. We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with them, working closely to enable innovation at scale."

About Amazon Web Services

For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 55 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About zulily

zulily, LLC, (http://www.zulily.com) is a retailer obsessed with bringing its customers special finds every day—all at incredible prices. zulily features an always-fresh curated collection for the whole family, including clothing, home decor, toys, gifts and more. Unique products from up-and-coming brands are featured alongside favorites from top brands, giving customers something new to discover each morning. zulily was launched in 2010 and is headquartered in Seattle with offices in Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania. For more information, visit www.zulily.com.

zulily, LLC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ:QRTEA, QRTEB)), which includes QVC, HSN, zulily and the Cornerstone brands (collectively, "Qurate Retail Group"), as well as other minority investments. Qurate Retail Group believes in a third way to shop – beyond transactional ecommerce or traditional brick-and-mortar stores – and is #1 in video commerce, #3 in ecommerce in North America and #3 in mobile commerce in the U.S. (according to Internet Retailer). For more information, visit www.qurateretailgroup.com.

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