Founded in 2010, Lenskart has grown rapidly and is now India’s largest offline and online prescription eyewear retailer. Its mission: attract millennials with fashionable designs that remove the link between “glasses” and “nerdy”. Although Lenskart boasts over 750 stores across India, over 90% of its sales come from online channels. The company plans to expand through digital channels, including home eye checkups and 3D try-ons.
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
As a leading Direct to Consumer brand, Lenskart made a decision to invest in online tools that enable customers to purchase from the comfort of their home. One such feature is a 3D try-on virtual mirror application which enables buyers to check out how a pair of glasses sits on their face from their smartphone. Looks good? Click, and the glasses are on their way. From India to anywhere in the world.
Lenskart realized that a key to online success is to make the jump to running applications cloud-natively, in other words, to take advantage of modern agile development tools that run on cloud-based microservices. Although they had applications running on the public cloud, much of Lenskart’s data was already hosted by NxtGen, a large Indian data center operator. They needed a solution which could offer them a hybrid solution, continuing to use their legacy infrastructure while migrating their application to a cloud-native based deployment.
GOING HYBRID: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
Ridge had the solution Lenskart needed: a hybrid production environment which enabled them to deploy a modern cloud native Kubernetes application — right next to their legacy workloads — with the same ease of use as a modern public cloud. Lenskart workloads could remain on local infrastructure but would be transported on Ridge Cloud to become cloud-native. Ridge’s suite of web services, including its CNCF-certified managed Kubernetes, offered Lenskart infrastructure flexibility and a modular approach to building, running, and updating application software.
Ridge provides this unique hybrid capability because Ridge Cloud is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. It runs on any physical server technology and on any underlying IaaS, virtualization system or bare metal machines. As a result, Ridge was able to offer Lenskart fast integration and the potential to hop on Ridge Cloud for deployments in virtually any location on the globe.
NO ONE SAID IT WOULD BE EASY, BUT….
The complexity of managing resource heavy cloud-native applications, such as those developed by Lenskart, drives organizations to automate time-consuming application processes with Kubernetes. But Ridge’s managed Kubernetes service (RKS) makes it simple: Lenskart’s developers were empowered to easily provision, configure and update physical resources. First, they were able to connect their Kubernetes clusters to existing local workloads through Ridge’s cluster VPN. Secondly, RKS is extremely straightforward to use: developers can easily and quickly spin-up and manage Kubernetes clusters.
OPENING UP NEW MARKETS WITH ONE API
Lenskart has already moved beyond the Indian market and aims to become a global eyewear provider. Ridge enables Lenskart to expand their footprint to additional locations with application deployments that don’t require any code change. Ridge’s API makes the future deployments completely seamless.
“Lenskart’s pioneering applications and their cloud migration were interesting challenges, and we’re proud that our managed Kubernetes service was instrumental in their success,” added Nir Sheffi, Ridge co-CEO and CTO. “Many companies want to go cloud-native, often on existing infrastructure as part of a hybrid cloud architecture. Our cloud-native building blocks, like RKS, make it relatively simple for them to take that step.”
ABOUT RIDGE
Ridge, the world’s most distributed cloud, unlocks the full potential of cloud computing. It empowers businesses to deploy applications anywhere, on any infrastructure, with no latency or data residency obstacles. Ridge’s simple-to-use cloud-native services, including CNCF certified managed Kubernetes, provide developers with public cloud agility together with private infrastructure performance.
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