K&L Wines

Award-Winning Wine Merchants

An on-premise infrastructure shift to Microsoft Azure

Terrace shifts K&L’s entire on-premises architecture to the Azure Cloud.

For 20 years, K&L maintained their own back-office database, mobile, and web servers accessed by customers and staff. With three retail stores and a central warehouse, they soon needed a long-term solution for higher performance of their entire business infrastructure.

Having worked with Terrace for more than 10 years on hundreds of software and back office projects, K&L trusted our expertise and recommendations. However, K&L was hesitant about Azure because their own sophisticated
infrastructure, with power redundancy and servers, was working well. They were concerned about being first to try the new environment.

In time, with our extensive knowledge of K&L’s infrastructure and close connections to the Azure team, we partnered with K&L to design and implement their infrastructure shift to Azure.

Azure had matured and stabilized, proving to be a secure and reliable feature-rich cloud solution that would sync the quality of K&L’s online customer experience with the personalized service their staff offered in retail stores.
The upgrade would provide a massive upgrade on server performance, up-time, speed, reliability and scalability.

We recommended a two-phased approach. A complete shift of K&L’s data center to an Azure IaaS solution in Phase 1 would be optimized in Phase 2, leveraging Azure’s feature-rich PaaS offerings to reduce their monthly IT spending.

Project
K&L Wine Merchants

Challenge

Offering fine and rare wines since 1976 and featuring real-time online inventories updated in real-time for over 20 years, K&L Wine Merchants has been acknowledged as one of the best online wine shops in Wine Enthusiast Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, and more. Growing rapidly, they soon began incurring significant software and infrastructure expenditures.

Terrace recommended moving their infrastructure to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, but a shift meant transferring their entire infrastructure and data center, a seemingly daunting and risky move when their existing centers were working well.

Solution
A shift of K&L’s entire infrastructure — customer e-commerce website, business intelligence, and multiple intranet management applications — to the Azure Cloud.

Technologies
Microsoft Azure, .NET Framework

“Terrace makes it easy without compromising quality. Their entire team takes the time to understand the exact business requirements and then develops truly excellent solutions. The process could not be any smoother.”

– Brian Zucker
Co-Owner, K&L Wine Merchants

Hand holding device showing K&L system with wine racks in the background

About K&L Wine Merchants

K&L is a recognized online retailer for collectors of fine and rare wines as well as for those looking for a great everyday bottle. Listed among the best online wine shops, K&L is recognized for their real-time inventory of available bottles at each retail location, the site’s easy navigation, and a painless delivery process. (The Wall Street Journal, 2009) They leverage today’s technology for reaching customers and have fueled their growth through a personal sommelier service, online auctions, mobile access and targeted email campaigns.

The Terrace Process

Listening

Terrace starts every project with a thorough understanding of business objectives and technical requirements.

Designing

Leveraging a wide repertoire of platforms and tools, Terrace architects use technologies tailored to your business.

Building

Terrace’s hand-picked team of engineers are among the finest in the industry – well-versed in the latest best practices and dedicated to an efficient and timely development process.

Terrace + K&L

Strategic Rollout

K&L selected Terrace for our deep, ground-up experience with Azure along with over 10 years experience working with and understanding their e-commerce and back office applications and infrastructure.

With our deep understanding of K&L’s business and what K&L hoped to accomplish we collaboratively architected the final solution. Brian Zucker, Founder and CEO noted, “It could not be overstated how important it is to do the work on the front end. Otherwise you end up putting out fires and dealing with crisis management if deployment goes sideways. Terrace’s deep dive on the front end into the requirements, documentation, testing, and Proof
of Concept — that’s where they really shine.”
Experienced with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), we worked with K&L to integrate their database, e-commerce, and in-store customer service systems, spec’ing out the environment for both reliability and scalability.
Through benchmark testing and a good feel for the services and apps running on the Azure servers, we worked to size the K&L servers appropriately. “Getting it sized to account for performance issues and extra costs,” Brian noted, “was the most challenging part of the project. Prepping for installment, deployment, post-deployment, support, maintenance, was all strong.”

Results

“They’re definitely not a ‘seat of your pants,’ let’s just throw this out there, cowboy-way-of-deployment type of company. I wouldn’t hesitate — Terrace is #1 — to go through Azure migration again. Am glad we waited awhile. I’m definitely not hesitant to do it again. Happy with the work that Terrace did to support that.

I gotta tell you it worked out very smooth. We didn’t feel any significant challenges. It was a successful project for K&L. They did a fantastic job spec’ing with deployment. I’m not sure what anyone could have done to improve on the way they did it. They did everything we asked.

Azure has been around a while…it’s a new way of looking at hosting the whole platform…finding a talented partner with deep experience there, that’s an important piece that Terrace brings.”

– Brian Zucker
Co-Owner, K&L Wine Merchants