Tire Store Chain
Getting communication ‘on the road again.’
An Overview
The Challenge
This tire retailer’s email clients were hosted on legacy hardware lacking the capability to authenticate or utilize SSL/TLS encryption. It needed its mail transfer agent to allow anonymous relay and unencrypted connections.
The Solution
We architected a mail transfer agent to relay transactional email from the in-store point of sale systems to internal recipients and external customers and vendors.
The Outcome
With the expert breadth of 2nd Watch’s technical skill, the tire retailer experienced zero downtime during traffic and workload migration.
01
About the Business
One of the largest and most respected independent tire store chains in the United States and recognized by J.D. Power in customer satisfaction and general maintenance, this retailer has grown to over 100 locations across the west and prides itself on product guarantees employing thousands of customer-oriented employees in the US.
02
The Business Challenges
A significant number of the company’s email clients were hosted on legacy hardware lacking the capability to authenticate or utilize SSL/TLS encryption. The company needed its mail transfer agent to allow anonymous relay and unencrypted connections. As an established AWS customer, the tire retailer wanted to elevate the benefits it was experiencing from the platform by using Amazon SES for all internal recipients and SendGrid for external recipients and utilize a single internal hostname to use for client configuration.
The retailer engaged 2nd Watch to architect a highly available mail transfer agent to relay transactional email from the in-store point of sale systems and network infrastructure to internal recipients and external customers and vendors.
03
The Solution
2nd Watch architected a solution utilizing a Postfix cluster hosted on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple availability zones. An auto-scale group maintained a minimum number of instances, and an internal Elastic Load Balancer fronted the cluster, monitoring instance health and distributing traffic. Each Postfix instance was configured to ignore SMTP client authentication attempts, continue a TLS handshake if requested by a client, and utilize a transport table to route email to SES or Sendgrid, based on the recipient email domain. Each instance also maintained a defined list of subnets that could relay and offloaded Postfix mail logs to CloudWatch.
04
The Business Benefits
With the expert breadth of 2nd Watch’s technical skill, the tire retailer experienced zero downtime during traffic and workload migration. The company can now relay transactional emails from in-store systems and infrastructure to internal recipients and external customers and vendors.
