About Muhiku
Muhiku is a leading online gifting platform based in Türkiye, offering curated and customizable gift boxes across categories such as chocolates, teas/coffees, candles, décor, beauty, accessories, photo-printed items, and flowers. Beyond ready-made concepts, Muhiku allows customers to create their own personalized gift boxes – making it a go-to platform for birthdays, anniversaries, and professional milestones. To continue growing without infrastructure limits, Muhiku partnered with V3rim for an AWS Migration that improved scalability, reduced costs, and boosted reliability.
The Initial Architecture
Muhiku originally ran a monolithic application on a single DigitalOcean server, backed by a single-instance MySQL database.
While this setup worked, it had some key limitations:
- Over-provisioning for peaks: To handle high traffic on special days like Valentine’s Day, the system was scaled for the maximum load – even though utilization stayed below 20% most of the time.
- Limited scalability: A single application instance made it harder to scale horizontally or run experiments like A/B testing.
- Operational risks: Any deployment or failure could impact the entire site.
The Challenge Behind Muhiku’s AWS Migration
Muhiku wanted to move to a scalable, cost-efficient, and resilient architecture that would:
- Automatically scale up during peak demand and scale down during quiet periods.
- Allow rolling deployments without affecting the entire platform.
- Reduce infrastructure costs while improving reliability.
Our AWS Migration Strategy and Implementation
V3rim migrated Muhiku from DigitalOcean to AWS, leveraging cloud-native services to create a modern, elastic architecture:
- ECS Fargate for Applications
- The monolith was containerized and deployed on ECS Fargate with smaller, auto-scaling tasks.
- A load balancer distributes traffic across containers, enabling seamless scaling.
- EFS for Shared Storage
- Since the application relies on disk for storing dynamic cold data, a shared Amazon EFS was integrated.
- This ensures consistency across scaling nodes while preventing data conflicts.
- Aurora Serverless for Databases
- The MySQL database was migrated to Amazon Aurora MySQL Serverless, providing elasticity to handle fluctuating traffic without manual intervention.
The Migration Process
Minimizing downtime was critical for Muhiku’s customer experience. The migration was carefully executed in five steps:
- Code & Application Readiness
- Application refactored to run on multiple instances.
- Deployed to ECS Fargate with EFS and Load Balancer, still connected to the DigitalOcean database.
- Traffic Redirection
- Once stable, DNS was updated to route traffic through AWS resources – ensuring a zero-downtime cutover.
- Database Migration with AWS DMS
- Initial sync from DigitalOcean MySQL to Aurora MySQL.
- Continuous data replication (CDC) kept both databases in sync.
- Database Switchover
- Application paused briefly.
- Credentials updated to point to Aurora.
- Reverse CDC enabled (Aurora to DigitalOcean) as a safety net in case rollback was required.
- Validation & Decommissioning
- One month of performance monitoring confirmed stability.
- DigitalOcean resources were decommissioned.
The Results
By migrating to AWS, Muhiku achieved:
- Minimal Downtime Migration: Customers experienced no disruption during the cutover.
- Elastic Scalability: The platform can now seamlessly handle seasonal spikes.
- Cost Optimization: Infrastructure scales down during off-peak times, reducing spend.
- Future-Readiness: A flexible foundation for A/B testing, new features, and faster deployments.
Conclusion
With its new AWS-based architecture, Muhiku is better positioned to deliver delightful customer experiences without worrying about infrastructure limits.
At V3rim, we help businesses like Muhiku modernize applications, reduce cloud costs, and scale with confidence.
👉 If you’re looking to improve your cloud architecture or plan a migration, reach out to us at info@v3rim.com – we’d love to explore how we can help.