GNC Reduces Infrastructure Costs by 59%

GNC knew that in order to scale, they had to move their operations to the Cloud. Unfortunately, when they did so, they configured their entire Cloud application in the same way that their on-prem solution had previously been configured. As a result, the ASE (Azure App Service Environment) was maxed out on its scale-up capabilities. ASE is the most robust service option that Microsoft provides at nearly $4000 per month. Despite this, GNC was still experiencing slowdowns in site and app performance.

In addition to performance issues, GNC was operating all site and app updates from one machine, which was accessed primarily by one employee. This resulted in a decentralized build process, delayed reactivity to downtime, and hours of manual effort.

CEI re-architected GNC’s monolithic API and split it into a collection of separate, well-architected APIs all wrapped behind API Management to improve security, scalability, caching, testing, and policies.

In addition, CEI implemented new business processes to facilitate more efficient deployments that had all the necessary approvals built-in so that new code could be released with confidence by anyone.

With their updated API architecture and improved processes, GNC was able to adjust their app service environment plan with Microsoft and reduce their costs by 59%.

In addition, GNC’s system handles 35 million API calls per month across 2,193 stores, which they could now monitor for errors in real-time.