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Customer Story

YourSurprise Successfully Migrates from On-Prem Software to Google Cloud Platform

Fast-growing gift shop gains stability and a modern, cloud-native mindset by migrating its software infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform

Related services
Cloud | GCP

Industry
Retail

Company
Binx.io | Part of Xebia

From its origins as a small team creating personalized songs in an attic back in 2005, YourSurprise has grown to become one of the largest online personalized gift shops in Europe, with an assortment of more than 3000 gifts. Headquartered in Zierikzee, The Netherlands, YourSurprise is active in over 22 countries.

Why
Outages from on-premise hosting provider disrupted growing business
What
Create a robust backend infrastructure to support constant flow of orders
How
Migrate from on-prem software infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform

A Growing Business Needs Stable Support

YourSurprise offers an assortment of over 3000 gifts in 22 different markets. To handle the constant flow of customer orders and order production, they needed a robust backend infrastructure. However, they were experiencing many outages from their on-premise hosting provider. They decided to resolve this by moving their entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Migrated and Ready for More Growth

For the migration of the infrastructure, YourSurprise called in the help of Xebia. Together they managed to execute the entire migration in only a few months—just in time for Mother’s Day, one of their busiest days of the year. On that day in 2019, YourSurprise recorded an all-time high in single-day revenues. Along the way, Xebia coached and trained the internal YourSurprise team on their cloud skills. Nowadays, the team works autonomously on GCP to further develop the platform.

“We were on a tight schedule to migrate our platform to GCP. Xebia was an important factor in us getting this done on time, and thanks to their expertise and openness our team learned a lot along the way.”
Your Surprise
Arne Timmerma CTO

Learning a Cloud-Native Mindset and Methodology

The Google Cloud Platform software stack consisted of Google Kubernetes Engine, CloudSQL, Cloud VPN, and Google Cloud Storage. The YourSuprise IT team started by containerizing the first applications. Xebia bootstrapped the team with cloud-native best practices and helped them implement their entire infrastructure as code using terraform. To help them work autonomously going forward, Xebia coached the team on how to adopt a cloud-native mindset and methodology.

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