Amazon Web Services Enterprise Support Helps Mary Kay Achieve Container “Freedom"

Mary Kay operates its entire business system on Amazon Web Services, but the journey of cloud optimization is not achieved overnight. Previously, Mary Kay underwent containerization and utilized a commercial third-party container platform to manage these containers. However, as the business grew, the software licensing fees for the third-party platform became increasingly high. Additionally, the original architectural design lacked sufficient elasticity, making it difficult to handle traffic peaks flexibly during online promotional events.

To simplify operations and maintenance, enabling the operations team to focus more on delivering high-quality applications while improving reliability, security, and cost optimization, Mary Kay decided to adopt Amazon EKS to fully manage its containerized micro services applications. However, with over 500 containerized micro services already running in the cloud and three separate environments for production, testing, and development, the migration to Amazon EKS posed significant challenges. The process required ensuring that normal business operations remained unaffected while leveraging Amazon EKS's robust management capabilities to maximize the elastic advantages of cloud computing resources, thereby enhancing overall performance peaks.

Mary Kay's technical team collaborated with Amazon Web Services Enterprise Support team to explore the operational mechanisms and advantages of Amazon EKS. Through multiple rounds of on-site expert discussions addressing specific challenges, they jointly developed a comprehensive migration plan.

Amazon EKS Ensures High Availability of Business Systems

Amazon EKS provides high availability for business systems. Through its health check mechanism, Amazon EKS ensures that the Pod containers of applications are always in a normal operating state. In the event of a failure, it automatically flags the problematic Pod and attempts to restart it or reroute traffic to other healthy nodes. Technicians can also use Pod Disruption Budget (PDB) to set rules, ensuring that a sufficient number of application instances remain available during cluster maintenance or updates, thereby preventing complete service interruptions. Additionally, by specifying container and underlying resource recycling policies, Amazon EKS ensures continuous and stable system operation even in cases of failures or resource constraints. At the same time, operations personnel can monitor application status in real-time through remote monitoring settings, facilitating rapid troubleshooting.

To ensure the security of the overall system, the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Support team provided IEM (Infrastructure Event Management) services, ensuring a smooth upgrade of Mary Kay's Amazon EKS system version. This enabled Mary Kay to achieve enhanced security protections and access to more new features. In the testing environment, Amazon Web Services’ technical experts provided full online support, successfully completing multiple consecutive version upgrades. Following this, Enterprise Support team also delivered a comprehensive upgrade solution guide to assist Mary Kay's technical team in performing system upgrades across multiple different environments.

Comprehensive Cloud Storage Cost Optimization Solution
Additionally, to address the need for reducing cloud system operation and maintenance costs, the Enterprise Support team provided a series of cost optimization solutions. Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a storage statistical management tool, offers multiple storage metrics and analyzes them to detect anomalies. Using this tool, Mary Kay optimized its database version control strategy, reducing unnecessary version archives, which led to a 75% decrease in data volume. The tool also helped identify and resolve a large number of erroneous file archives caused by failed file synchronization uploads. Furthermore, Mary Kay utilized Amazon Budgets to monitor monthly expenses and promptly detect sudden cost spikes due to misconfigured calls to Amazon ECS container orchestration, enabling timely optimizations and improvements.

The Containerization Migration Has Been Fully Completed, Resulting in 25% Improvement of Business System Performance and 50% Reduction in Overall Costs.

With the help of Enterprise Support, Mary Kay successfully completed the Amazon EKS migration project in Amazon Web Services China region as planned. Over 500 microservices across all three environments have been migrated to Amazon EKS. Compared to the pre-migration state, overall costs have been reduced by more than 50%.

In terms of performance, the previous third-party container design scheme had a limitation of 1 million requests per minute. After migrating to Amazon EKS, the elastic scaling capabilities of the container cluster were enhanced significantly. During business promotion peak, the system can rapidly scale to handle traffic peaks of up to 1.6 million requests per minute easily. Compared to before, the application's processing capacity per minute has also increased by 25%.

Furthermore, through the implementation of a series of cloud storage cost optimization solutions, Mary Kay successfully achieved its annual cost reduction target of 10%.

Comprehensively Accelerate Technological Innovation to Empower Business Growth.
With the support of the Enterprise Support, Mary Kay's technical team is accelerating innovation and further enhancing its cloud utilization capabilities. For example, they are building a monitoring and alerting system, Prometheus, within Amazon EKS to better collect, process, and query various metrics data in the Kubernetes environment. They are also attempting to back up the database directly to Amazon S3 using Amazon Storage Gateway to avoid the additional costs associated with the previous complex backup solutions.

Joe Ye, Mary Kay's Senior Director of IT said: "The Amazon Web Services Enterprise Support team not only provides rapid responses, but also brings us world leading technologies, solutions and best practices. They actively coordinate with top technical experts and various resources within the company to solve the various problems we encounter in our actual work. On this basis, we will continue to enhance our cloud - based technical capabilities and actively explore emerging business scenarios such as intelligent customer service."

In 1963, Mary Kay Ash founded the cosmetics company of her dreams. Today, her dream has blossomed into an international company with operations in nearly 40 countries and regions worldwide, generating billions of dollars in annual sales and employing millions of independent sales consultants. Mary Kay entered the Chinese market in 1995, establishing its administrative center in Shanghai and setting up its Asia-Pacific production center in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Today, China has become one of Mary Kay's most important and promising markets globally.
"Happiness Store" is a personalized sales platform launched by Mary Kay for its beauty consultants in the Chinese market. Beauty consultants can easily set up and run their own online stores via their mobile phones. Customers can enter the "Happiness Store" at any time to place orders independently, and products are delivered directly from Mary Kay's warehouse to the customers. In this way, beauty consultants can skip the inventory - preparation process in the traditional sales model. They can fully control their working hours and run their beauty business in a "zero - inventory" and low - risk manner. The “Happiness Store” empowers independent beauty consultants to provide consumers with professional and personalized beauty solutions and services without barriers. This enhances the market competitiveness of independent beauty consultants and marks Mary Kay's official transformation into an “integrated online-to-offline business model.” Mary Kay offers women a variety of choices for happy entrepreneurship. Through technological empowerment, it further lowers the barriers for women to start their own businesses. The "Happiness Store" enables women to embark on their entrepreneurial journey easily.

Mary Kay has demonstrated remarkable excellence in product research and development. It has obtained more than 1,600 patents globally and launched over 200 products in the Chinese market. The company invests millions of dollars annually in R&D to ensure that every Mary Kay product meets the highest standards of safety, quality and efficacy. At the same time, Mary Kay is actively implementing 15 goals for 2030 in the areas of business excellence, product responsibility, responsible production, women's empowerment and social impact, with the commitment to creating positive impacts on China's economy, environment and society.