AZRIELI GROUP

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Azrieli Group is the leading commerce company in Israel. With dozens of shopping malls and an e-commerce website (www.azrieli.com). Sela has a track record of over 3 decades in leading the consulting and technology knowledge in Israel. Sela, as an MSP, helped Aspire Global reaching its business goals on Microsoft Azure. Azrieli business problems that were tackled Azrieli approached sela to help them find the root cause for a prolonged response time for their e-commerce website. The daughter company Azrieli.com is a combination of previously purchased companies, so the code behind the website has been migrated several times before; the site is not well documented and has had many developers working on it thought out the year. after a migration (lift and shift and then some minor modernization) to Azure, the site has been experiencing prolonged response times resulting in existential costs well above the expected predictions.

AS PART OF THE WORK, WE HAD COME UP WITH THE FOLLOWING ISSUES:

1. Identify and characterize new infrastructure models and challenges.
2. High setup fee.
3. No application monitoring system was installed.
4. Scaling issues for supporting large data volumes.
5. The site is written in soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and cannot migrate to new infrastructure.

AZIRELI HAD A PROBLEM:

1. Timeline considerations were very limiting since, as a public company, they have to notify of any infrastructure changes in advance to their stakeholders.
2. Because this is a public-facing website and has a high traffic volume: the site could not be taken down and always remain running.

HOW DOES SELA HELP?

Sela has a unique positioning as an SI, a Software House, and a Training Partner. This enables us to give a 360 degrees coverage to the customer from the infrastructure, through DevOps, to the Data and Development, giving them the best solution and making a transformation within the teams by providing a comprehensive knowledge transfer and a state of mind transformation. We at SELA believe we should forget about "Lift & Shift," it is not a unique enough solution, and it leaves the conversation around pricing. Besides SELA being the leading cloud partner in MEA SELA is also a software lab and a college, allowing us to debug and transform customer applications to offer complete "Lift & Transfer" methodology. SELA experts have written several books on Dotnet performance best practices and modernization. Key Solution Areas The solution combines the following areas: Open Source, Application insights, Data and SQL, and Infrastructure. To find and improve the website's performance, SELA firstly installed Azure Application Insights monitoring tools, and Application Insight allows us to pinpoint the exact line of code or SQL calls that cause performance issues. After installing Application insights, we were able to view the website traffic and found that the site has a problem while loading and that there are hundreds of SQL calls for every page load, an issue that causes an extensive load on the SQL server (the server had to be upscaled number of times to meet the demand) Our experts found using both application insights, SQL profiler, and native .NET tools ways to reduce the API and SQL calls. We assisted Azrieli in writing new data access layers to dramatically reduce the number of SQL calls and implemented Redis cache to mitigate some SQL calls.

THE MAIN BENEFITS ACHIEVED

• Enable the ability to "pinpoint" exact problems and find the "line of code" causing the problem.
• Reducing SQL and API calls by using Redis cache
• Azileli site now loads faster and can serve more users with the same infrastructure.
• The service we provided enabled Azrieli to meet their strict timeline. As a result – they can offer their services in a scalable approach, potentially gaining more customers than before.

THE MAIN TECHNOLOGIES THAT WERE USED IN THE SOLUTION

• SELA's experts delivered the following infrastructure solution for Azrieli Group (All the below technologies were deployed over Azieli new Azure subscription):
• Established these services and components in order to create reduce the amount of load used by the front-end
  • Azure Application insights
  • Redis cache
  • Application services with private endpoint
  • Azure SQL Database