Migrating E-Commerce Infrastructure in the Retail Publishing Industry to AWS

Executive Summary

PT Gramedia Asri Media, one of Indonesia’s largest retail and publishing companies, migrated its e-commerce platform infrastructure from Alibaba Cloud to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve reliability, gain better operational visibility, and align with enterprise-level standards.

The migration, executed by PT. Innovation Cloud Services (ICS), enabled Gramedia to run its digital commerce operations more securely and efficiently while preparing for future growth.

The Challenge

Gramedia operates a multi-channel business that includes bookstores, online commerce, digital

publishing, and learning platforms. The company previously hosted its e-commerce backend on

Alibaba Cloud but encountered limitations in observability, infrastructure control, and environment consistency.

As traffic and transaction volumes grew, so did the challenges in monitoring performance, managing costs, and ensuring uptime. The existing setup also created friction for the internal DevOps team, particularly when deploying or debugging across environments. To support Gramedia’s digital ambitions, a more scalable and manageable cloud infrastructure was needed.

The Solution

ICS designed and executed a full infrastructure migration to AWS, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to improve system maintainability and reproducibility. The solution involved:

1. Compute Migration

Core workloads were moved from Alibaba ECS to Amazon EC2 and AWS Auto Scaling Groups, ensuring flexibility and high availability.

2. Containerization

Key services were migrated to run on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using Amazon EC2 instances, giving the DevOps team more granular control over container orchestration while maintaining high availability.

3. Infrastructure as Code

All infrastructure components — including compute, storage, databases, networking, and IAM— were provisioned using Terraform, allowing the DevOps team to manage environments more consistently across development, staging, and production.

4. Monitoring and Observability

Amazon CloudWatch was configured to provide full observability of logs, metrics, and events. This gave Gramedia better insight into system health and helped reduce time to resolution.

5. Database Modernization

Relational data previously managed on Alibaba RDS remains hosted on EC2-based databases in the AWS environment. Plans are in place to transition these workloads to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to simplify backup, failover, and maintenance operations.

6. DNS and CDN Configuration

DNS records were moved to Amazon Route 53, and content delivery was optimized using Amazon CloudFront, improving page load speed and user experience.

7. Security and Access Management

IAM roles and security groups were restructured to align with AWS best practices, reducing exposure and improving audit readiness.

Business Outcomes

By moving to AWS, Gramedia gained more than just infrastructure reliability. The migration empowered the internal team with clearer control, reduced deployment friction, and more visibility into system behavior. Maintenance windows have been reduced, and the IT team can

now deploy confidently with version-controlled infrastructure.

Uptime and service responsiveness have improved, supporting a better customer experience across Gramedia’s online properties. The cloud environment is also now more secure and compliant, with consistent access policies and audit logs in place.

Why It Matters for Retail and Digital Publishing

For companies that straddle both physical and digital retail, customer experience is heavily influenced by backend infrastructure. Gramedia’s migration journey demonstrates how retailers can improve platform reliability, developer velocity, and long-term scalability by adopting modern cloud infrastructure — all without disrupting ongoing operations.

About ICS

PT. Innovation Cloud Services (ICS) is an AWS Advanced Partner in Indonesia, focused on helping businesses modernize their infrastructure, migrate cloud workloads, and build high-performance environments for e-commerce, publishing, and enterprise applications.