Spiraledge: Supporting customer health and wellness

About Spiraledge

Spiraledge is a health and ecommerce company with sites in the online retail, activity tracking, and farm management spaces. Founded in 2001, technology drives the Spiraledge culture and has been a key contributor to its success.

Industries: Wellness, Retail & Consumer Goods
Location: United States

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About Rackspace

As a managed cloud provider, Rackspace provides technical expertise and support to its customers on a variety of cloud ecosystems.

Spiraledge uses Google Cloud and Rackspace to help ensure that its portfolio of health and ecommerce brands has the agility to scale and respond in real time to unpredictable traffic swings.

Google Cloud results

  • Improves responsiveness to seasonal traffic spikes with Google Cloud scalability
  • Completes 13TB migration with zero downtime through Google reliability and ease of use
  • Increases key business results through a pipeline of R&D platform innovations

Reduces time for scaling instances from weeks to minutes

Whether it's buying workout gear or tracking your daily exercise, many consumers are passionate about their health. Online retail company Spiraledge taps into people's interest in health-related products and services via its brands and properties, which include ecommerce sites SwimOutlet and YogaOutlet, swimming exercise tracking platform Swim.com, and diversified farm management platform Tend. From food quality and transparency to physical wellness as part of an active lifestyle, Spiraledge is focused on healthy living. All of its brands help drive the daily work and larger mission of Spiraledge.

As a growing company, Spiraledge sought to improve its scalability to better respond to changing demands. For instance, traffic for Spiraledge ecommerce properties regularly spiked during peak buying seasons including the summer or holidays as buyers purchased yoga and swimming equipment. When Spiraledge planned to migrate from its legacy backend systems, performance and agility were major factors in evaluating a new environment.

"Without Google Cloud, it would be difficult to build and invest in the applications we need to respond to changing customer and infrastructure workloads. Within our properties, Google has changed how we manage the seasonal needs of our businesses."

John Anthony, Chief Information Officer, Spiraledge

"One of the key things we wanted was the ability to scale infrastructure based on seasonality," says John Anthony, Chief Information Officer at Spiraledge. "Having to plan out issues such as server allocations weeks in advance made it difficult to quickly and effectively respond to fluctuating infrastructure and traffic conditions."

By migrating to Google Cloud and working with Google Cloud partner Rackspace, Spiraledge can now solve these challenges. From real-time scalability to organization-wide analytics, Google Cloud allows Spiraledge to take complete control over its infrastructure and tailor it to maximize customer satisfaction.

"Without Google Cloud, it would be difficult to build and invest in the applications we need to respond to changing customer and infrastructure workloads," says John. "Within our properties, Google has changed how we manage the seasonal needs of our businesses."

Supporting Spiraledge properties

Compute Engine provides Spiraledge with valuable scalability, giving the company the ability to call up instances and allocate capacity on demand without having to navigate physical hardware restrictions. For its enterprise resource planning applications, Spiraledge currently spins up thousands of temporary instances per month and uses them alongside Cloud Dataflow to run forecasts on its sales velocity, pricing, and inventory needs. The result is a 70 percent improvement in Spiraledge's ability to forecast customer demand more accurately.

With Google Cloud usage-based pricing, Spiraledge can respond to unpredictable platform workloads in minutes instead of weeks while avoiding being locked into the cost-prohibitive cycle of paying for and decommissioning excess static hardware allocations.

"Every month, we're seeing Google make significant investments into Google Cloud. The platform gives us the ability to adjust based on business demands and we can proactively solve challenges instead of simply responding to them once they become problems."

John Anthony, Chief Information Officer, Spiraledge

BigQuery is the primary data warehousing solution for Spiraledge retail properties, which hold around 13 terabytes of data. BigQuery acts as a data pipeline for internal dashboards used by multiple Spiraledge engineering and sales departments, providing instant data visibility and decision-making insights without adding unnecessary complexity for non-technical employees.

In addition, Stackdriver provides administrators with constant visibility into infrastructure conditions and Spiraledge plans to use App Engine to support applications that were previously on Compute Engine. Google Cloud reliability also helped Spiraledge navigate the migration process. Spiraledge retail properties posed the biggest initial hurdle, as 13 terabytes of data needed to move without more than 4 hours of downtime. Fortunately, the company completed its migration without any deployment issues.

"Every month, we're seeing Google make significant investments into Google Cloud," says John. "The platform gives us the ability to adjust based on business demands and we can proactively solve challenges instead of simply responding to them once they become problems."

Maximizing cloud resources

Rackspace was an invaluable partner for Spiraledge throughout the entire migration process, helping the retail company design its architecture on Google Cloud and actively working alongside company staff on its deployment day. The migration's success led Spiraledge to continue working with Rackspace on its Customer Reliability Engineering workshops, which helped educate the company on ways to optimize Google Cloud and build its post-migration architecture around retail and customer needs.

"Whether it's managing tooling or optimizing instances, Rackspace helps us fully utilize the breadth of Google Cloud. I don't think we could have moved to Google without collaborating with Rackspace."

John Anthony, Chief Information Officer, Spiraledge

Regular support from Rackspace helped unlock the potential of Google Cloud for Spiraledge. Rackspace support streamlines environment management via descriptor files and the company has seen an increase in research projects that drive future engineering and platform innovations.

"As a leading managed services provider, Rackspace has been an important partner for us to lean on when solving technical problems," says John. "Whether it's managing tooling or optimizing instances, Rackspace helps us fully utilize the breadth of Google Cloud. I don't think we could have moved to Google without collaborating with Rackspace."

Providing a healthy foundation

By migrating to Google Cloud, Spiraledge combines improved infrastructure performance with the ability to identify and solve problems that could cause potential downtime. In one past scenario, Spiraledge launched a new firewall feature that caused a workout data pipeline issue with a partner. Spiraledge had the partner send over files as a temporary workaround, but initially, the packages were large enough to potentially take down the Spiraledge platform every hour.

On G, Spiraledge quickly scaled up its compute and database and instance capacity to handle high-volume workloads without the risk of platform downtime.

"Moving to Google Cloud gave us the modern cloud-based infrastructure and scalability we needed," says John. "We're making our systems a lot more robust, putting Spiraledge in a better position. The services available on Google Cloud give us a path to further boost platform scalability to better serve customers and have a positive impact on business outcomes."

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Spiraledge

Spiraledge is a health and ecommerce company with sites in the online retail, activity tracking, and farm management spaces. Founded in 2001, technology drives the Spiraledge culture and has been a key contributor to its success.

Industries: Wellness, Retail & Consumer Goods
Location: United States

About Rackspace

As a managed cloud provider, Rackspace provides technical expertise and support to its customers on a variety of cloud ecosystems.