1. Ready Flowers Limited
Flowers and Gifts in the Cloud
Presented By
ThomasHegarty
August2013

2. Introduction
READY FLOWERS is one of the market leading on-line retailers of
flowers, hampers and special gifts in South East Asia.
Our customer base of more than 500,000 customers has used
READY FLOWERS’ services over the last 7 years to deliver fresh and
meaningful messages of love to special people.
 Same Day Delivery Service
 Sending flowers to 90 countries
 Operating 100% from Hong Kong

3. Key Problem
 People are not close to the person they want to send a gift /
message to
 Finding a reliable flower / gift supplier in a remote location is
difficult
 Not all suppliers accept different payment methods
 Very few local suppliers provide online ordering.

4. Solution
 The Ready Flowers system is designed to automatically collect
and send orders created from a network of websites and place
them with suppliers anywhere in the world. Currently a majority of
orders pass through the system without needing to be touched by
an operator.
 Ready Flowers makes it easy for customers to order flowers and
gifts via web / phone
 Ready Flowers has the ability to send to multiple locations so
customers don’t need to use different suppliers for different
orders.
 Same day delivery in 90 locations around the world
 24/7 ordering capability

5. Website
Portals
 The Ready Flowers Portal Platform is a network of roughly 90
websites that are based around specific geographical regions for
customers to go and buy flowers and gifts to send anywhere
around the world. Each site has a specific catalogue that relates to
a particular region, has the capability to display multiple
languages and multiple currencies.

6. Order
Management
 ODIN is the central point for all orders that Ready Flowers
manages and is the main point of contact for all customer service
staff.With a proven capability of managing 10,000’s of orders at a
time, it is capable of scaling up with business demand even during
peak seasonal events such asValentines Day and Mothers Day.

7. Allocation Hub
 Allocation Hub is a web based system where suppliers go to access
all available orders in a specific geographical region.Within
Allocation hub suppliers have the ability to view / accept / reject
orders, get payment details automatically and see a daily list of
work to be done.

8. RealTime
Reporting
 The RealTime Reporting System shows up to the minute
information on how the business is running.There is a desktop and
a mobile version.

9. RapidGrowth
 Ready Flowers has experienced rapid growth in all markets over
the last 8 years.
 Serving customers in over 172 countries, delivering into 90
countries around the world.
 100+ Million views of Products / Categories in 4 years.
 5 Million Requests / day during peak CDNTraffic
 12 MillionAdwords Clicks (since Feb 2013)
 5 Million+ Product combinations
 2 Million+ Location Based Landing Pages

10. Event Days –
Flower
Industry
 Valentines Day
 Mothers Day
 On Event Days, Ready Flowers experiences rapid increase in traffic
over a 2 – 5 day period.
 The industry as a whole is extremely busy, and ensuring that
customers and suppliers have continuity of service is imperative.
 Everyone wants Red Roses forValentines day and flowers for their
mum on Mothers Day

11. Technology
Development Layer
 ASP .NETVB / C#
 MVC 4.0 (Partial)
 MS SQL
 Couch DB
 Mongo DB
Infrastructure
 AmazonWeb Services
 Cachefly
 AI Cache
Other
 Asterisk
 GoogleApps

12. Scaling for an
Event
 CustomerTraffic increases at least 10+ fold
 GooglebotTraffic increases 30+ Fold (Not Included)

13. V-Day DDOS
Attack
 1am, 14th February, 2012 - Ready Flowers experienced a targeted
DDOS
 DDOS attack lasted 24 hours
 All systems were down for 4 hours, customers and suppliers could
not access any systems
 Cost to the Business –Lost sales, undelivered order refunds and
reputation damage – Estimated AUD $1,000,000

14. Original
Infrastructure
 Private Cloud
 1 x SAN
 1 x SQL Database Servers
 1 x Netscaler
 1 x Asterisk Server
 Cachefly for serving all image data
 Citrix Xen Server Cluster (2 x Sun Servers)
 8 x Windows 2008 Web Servers
 6 x Memcache Servers
 1 x Windows Active Directory Server
 2 x DNS Servers
 2 x Mail Servers
 2 x Apache Server (MySQL / OTRS Server)
 1 xTerminal Server

15. Stepped
Approach –
PrivateCloud
 AICache used as proxy
 aiScaler is a website caching layer that off-loads requests from the
web, application and database tiers using unique patterns of url and
cookie variables.

16. Fully Moving
to theCloud
 Moved it within 1 week to Amazon Cloud

17. UsingAmazon
on a regular
Day
 11 x Load Balancers (Multiple SSL Certificates)
 10 xWindows R2Web Servers (Ready Flowers)
 2 x CouchDB Servers (Web Server Caching to SQL DB)
 2 x aiCache aiScaler Servers (Web Servers to Customers)
 1 x RabbitMQ Server (Allocation Hub)
 2 xVPC Gateways (Access for RegionalOffices – Hong Kong /
Australia)
 2 x Apache Servers (Wiki / Reporting Server)
 2 x MSSQL Servers
 3 x Mongo DB Servers (Allocation Hub)
 1 x DomainController (Active Directory)

18. Key Benefits of
theCloud
 Infrastructure on demand
 Valentines Day / Mothers Day
 World class perimeter security
 VPC to Local Offices
 Cost effective computing
 Use spot pricing to scale up when needed
 Automation & simplification of system administration tasks
 Can scale up within 5 minutes
 Multiple virtual datacentres
 Have replication in different locations

19. Amazon
ProductsUsed
 EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing)
 VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
 ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
 Provision IO (Fast Storage)
 S3 (Simple Storage Service)
 Route 53 (DNS)
 Cloudfront (Content Delivery Network)
 Cloudwatch (Monitoring)

20. ThankYou -
Questions
 www.readyflowers.com
 www.onsavii.com
 Presented ByThomas Hegarty – Managing Director