Pixartprinting can now handle variable user loads across the year and cope with even the busiest of days. “We’re now ready for any Black Friday event, whereas before we spent days and nights fixing things to cope with high demand,” says Pesce. The brand is now maximizing its revenue growth potential, grossing more than €1 million ($1.2 million) a day in sales. It has also freed up developer time. The resulting innovative culture is impressive. “Our time-to-market for new services or upgrades has been cut from days to 15 minutes, maximum,” says Pesce. “We’ve basically jumped from the Stone Age to microservices with AWS.”

Pixartprinting can thank the microservices structure it adopted, and subsequently expanded under Cimpress, for its leaner approach to consumer spending. The company has divided its customer base into target audiences using microservices to build sales portals dedicated to specific products and therefore specific audiences. It’s this type of agility that the organization was seeking when it broke away from its monolithic structure. “We will be able to group people by country, age, niche, and more. We just can’t wait,” says Pesce.

While the microservices structure has had a tangible effect on productivity and innovation, it has also lowered costs. “We’re spending less overall and we’re able to achieve far more today than was possible before. It’s all down to the fact we’ve changed so much with AWS,” Pesce explains. “In fact, it has been such a dramatic change we can’t even measure it!”