Etnia Barcelona

Overview

Etnia Barcelona is an independent eyewear brand from Barcelona focused on creating colorful designs with natural acetate and mineral lenses. Etnia represents the essence of the company: a brand that embodied the idea of being free, human and respectful towards all ethnicities with color and art as the way to go. The company has more than 400 employees, 10.000 points of sales and 4 subsidiaries in Asia, Canada and The United States. In 2018 Etnia Barcelona billed more than 66MM, a raise of 3.12% in comparison with 2017. In 2019 the company invested 3MM on creating their own production center to control the design and prototyping and supervise the production workflow between Spain and Hong Kong. During 2020 the company made a -10% due to the COVID but the forecast at the end of 2022 is to bill about 80MM, a raise of 30%.

Goals

Apply a CI/CD deployment process in order to automatize the deployments.
Create a stress environment on Azure add guarantees during deployment process.
Assist the development team when moving to Cloud Computing.

technologies used

Backend development:

Bash
Make
Docker
Nginx
PHP-FPM
PHP-FPM Exporter
MySQL
JMeter

Kubernetes development:

Azure
Kind/Kubernetes
K9s
Helm
Prometheus Operator Stack

Challenges

The scale of the project and the team - Etnia Barcelona has an IT department based on 14 members distributed in two departments one related with Marketing Dept. and other with SAP, B2C, DBA and systems administrators. Getting to know the project, processes and workflows is something that was not trivial. We manage to adapt to the current workflows while proposing alternative ones that could improve the global performance and/or their daily basis tasks.
The absence of tests - When we joined Etnia Barcelona the projects belonging to the Marketing Department were developed with vague test suits, partially covering critical workflows. This absence of tests also affected their deployment process forcing them to perform manual tasks and checks.
Using opaque infrastructure - The Marketing Department uses an opaque infrastructure due they cannot access any metric related to the new feature’s impact, nor any dashboard in which they can detect infrastructure issues or bottlenecks.

What we did

Business Impact

Our collaboration with Etnia was modernizing their B2B platform by moving their infrastructure to a Kubernetes cluster located in Azure and working on the CI/CD system, allowing a fast paced development lifecycle and a more reliable system with better monitoring system.

The project took 2 months to complete.

Business impact: