Dapr+Diagrid Conductor: Powering the teams that build and run the Sharper Image Commerce Cloud

Camelot SI LLC (Sharper Image Licensee of SharperImage.com) is an American online retailer that specializes in home electronics, gifts, and other lifestyle products. With a strong customer focus, the retail website is aimed to be the ultimate shopping experience offering product videoclips, customer ratings, easy order tracking and access to real-time, toll-free customer support.

A Seamless Shopping Experience, Powered by Dapr

The Sharper Image Commerce Cloud is composed of over 70+ microservices running in production on Kubernetes, processing in excess of 80,000+ orders per day at peak periods such as Black Friday. The business critical role of this system means it must be stable under pressure, respond to changes with agility, and the development team can quickly identify and solve problems.

Simplified Microservices Development

Camelot SI has been a user of the Dapr project for many years and it has become a core component in their business solutions. The Sharper Image Commerce Cloud depends on Dapr for pub/sub asynchronous communication, synchronous service invocation, state management, and task scheduling. Dapr has significantly simplified microservices development by abstracting the complexities associated with setting up services compared to the previous in-house microservices framework.This simplification has directly contributed to an increase in developer output, enabling our team to focus more on creating business value rather than dealing with application architecture and infrastructure challenges.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs, Enhanced Operational Efficiency

By transitioning to Dapr, Camelot SI eliminated the overhead associated with their custom microservices framework, leading to substantial cloud infrastructure cost savings. Dapr's lightweight and efficient design has proven to be instrumental in optimizing resource utilization, thereby reinforcing its value in their technology stack. Switching to Dapr delivered over 99% reduction in CPU usage from 3.5 to 0.03 cores. Strategically, this shift also helped streamline their microservices architecture, reduced the amount of code to maintain, and significantly enhanced operational efficiency. Since making the switch, the team has increased their Dapr adoption and developed many other supporting apps to take advantage of the wide selection of Dapr building block APIs.

Conductor: Free Up Developers’ Time, Simplify Security

To further lower the operational overhead of running Dapr on their AWS-deployed Kubernetes clusters, Camelot SI became an early adopter of Diagrid Conductor in 2022. The Camelot SI development team exclusively uses Conductor for upgrading Dapr and has reported that it saves the team more than an hour of valuable developer time for each cluster upgraded, with the added confidence of having guaranteed rollbacks in the event of any issues. Additionally, Conductor provides scheduled zero-downtime mTLS certificate rotation for their Dapr apps on their Kubernetes clusters, enabling development team members to focus on improving the business code and other higher value tasks, whilst giving them confidence in their security posture.

Optimize Kubernetes Resources

Right-sizing Kubernetes workloads is a complex ongoing task and one of the most frequent challenges an operations team encounters. Sidecar architectures, as used by Dapr, can be wastefully resource-intensive if not implemented correctly. To fix this, Conductor provides detailed Kubernetes performance advisories for setting the optimal memory and CPU requests and limits for Dapr-enabled apps and sidecars, including a 10% resource buffer. Camelot SI uses these advisories to set resource requests and limits on their services, improve their overall provisioning and reduce the cost of their Kubernetes clusters

Detect & Resolve Errors Faster

Conductor's comprehensive tracking of Dapr-enabled applications and the Dapr control plane offers real-time metrics, logs, and insights into the system performance and potential issues.The Camelot SI team has set up Dapr-specific notifications to meticulously monitor the Sharper Image Commerce Cloud, running on Kubernetes. This has resulted in faster identification and resolution of application errors, including latency and CPU/memory issues, saving an average of 15-minutes per incident. Camelot SI has seen immediate benefits: reduction in developer time spent on troubleshooting and a decrease in system downtime, ensuring services remain robust and responsive - critical during high volume peak usage.

Enhanced Observability

Diagrid Conductor, with its well-designed and intuitive interface, has transformed how Camelot SI monitors “Daprized'' applications. A comprehensive administrative tool, Conductor consolidates monitoring capabilities in one place, enhancing the operational visibility and control over the Sharper Image Commerce Cloud. This consolidation has streamlined the team’s monitoring processes, making it easier and more efficient to oversee the service health and performance.

Operate Dapr in Production With Confidence

The transition to Dapr for microservices system architecture development, combined with Diagrid Conductor for operations has marked a pivotal shift in Camelot SI's approach to microservices and devops. Dapr has significantly reduced the complexity of developing and managing microservices, leading to increased developer productivity and efficiency. Meanwhile, Diagrid Conductor is an indispensable tool for monitoring and managing Daprized services, providing comprehensive insights and enhancing overall operational agility. Together, these have streamlined Camelot SI's processes, delivering considerable cost savings and improved service reliability. Camelot SI’s journey over the last couple of years underscores the transformative power of adopting innovative technologies to address the challenges in microservices architectures and has also set a benchmark for operational excellence in the retail industry.

You can try Diagrid Conductor with your own Dapr clusters today. Click here for more information on Conductor and how to get started.