INDUSTRY - RETAIL

Wayfair saves over $150K per year with GitHub

Wayfair, the American e-commerce powerhouse, wanted to boost operational efficiency and avoid the hassles of Cloud administration with an enterprise-grade migration. Partnering with Modus Create, Wayfair successfully migrated all its repositories from GitHub Enterprise Server to GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC), unlocking significant cost savings.

OUR WORK INVOLVED

GitHub Enterprise Cloud provisioning and integration with identity systems
Development of migration scripts, dry runs, and testing
Training and development

IMPACT

$150K

per year saved in operational costs

15,578

repositories migrated

ENHANCED

security with custom reverse proxy

Large enterprises often hit a wall when it comes to big platform migrations, which involve a maze of accounts, dependencies, business needs, and stakeholders.

Yet, some enterprises defy expectations and embrace change at a pace that rivals nimble startups.

Here’s how one of America’s largest e-commerce companies boosted its operational efficiency by migrating over 15K repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Wayfair is a leading online retailer specializing in home goods, offering an extensive selection of over 14 million furniture, décor, and home improvement products. With offices and warehouses throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland, China, and the United Kingdom, Wayfair operates five branded retail websites — Wayfair, Joss & Main, AllModern, Birch Lane, and Perigold.

Challenge

Enterprise-grade migration under a tight deadline

For years, Wayfair ran GitHub Enterprise Server on an internal network, integrating with a variety of systems in their hybrid cloud environment.

In 2023, Wayfair launched an ambitious initiative to migrate over 15K repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC). This project, however, came with its own set of daunting challenges — from the sheer scale of migration to an aggressive timeline.

Modus Create had earlier helped Wayfair with a Confluence cloud migration. We teamed up once again and kicked off the project to migrate all of Wayfair’s repositories to GHEC by April 2024, before Wayfair's blockbuster event — Way Day.

Migration planning and provisioning

Led by Modus Create's Distinguished Engineer Richard Bullington-McGuire, our team kicked off the migration with a plan to move all the repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud using the GitHub Enterprise Importer. This allowed for a high-fidelity migration, preserving both the entire version control history, and the repository metadata such as pull requests, issues, and configurations.

With around 15,000 repositories, Wayfair faced a daunting migration task. To streamline the process, we opted for a 1-to-1 migration of all organizations, users, and groups to GitHub.com, utilizing a reverse proxy to access resources on Wayfair's internal network.

We integrated GitHub Enterprise Cloud with Wayfair’s enterprise identity system, swiftly provisioning users and groups into the Enterprise Managed User system. Creating organizations to mirror the existing organizations from GitHub Enterprise Server ensured a smooth transition.

Creating a proof of concept

Our team worked on creating a valuable proof of concept for migration and took a series of actions, highlighted in the image below.

Modus Create was an amazing partner for our GitHub migration to the GitHub cloud. We needed someone that could come in with expertise and show us the way, not just supplement our capacity.

— Mark Quigley, Wayfair’s Global Leader for Engineering Effectiveness

Every repository migration was tracked in a Jira spreadsheet, ensuring 100% issue traceability and auditing progress throughout the process.

Migrating 15,578 repositories

Such an ambitious migration project had its fair share of challenges.

In January 2024, Wayfair went through organizational restructuring, causing a 6-to-8-week delay in the migration, as many affected individuals were key constituents and planners of the project. Despite this setback, the combined team managed to regroup and continue executing the migration plans. A critical factor in our success was having well-documented plans for handling the most complex subsystems, which we adapted and utilized effectively.

The high-fidelity migration allowed Wayfair to preserve repository configurations, pull requests, and integrations with both internal and third-party systems. The entire project — from planning to migrating the last repository took 32 weeks to complete. After meticulous planning and many dry runs, 98% of the repositories got migrated in the final 8 weeks of the engagement.

Impact

Higher scalability and efficiency

Wayfair managed to complete the migration well in advance of Way Day, the second biggest retail event of the year for Wayfair after Black Friday.

By meticulously testing the migration process, and tracking every repository, we managed to get 100% of the repositories migrated to GitHub.com.

With GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Wayfair can effortlessly manage a growing number of repositories, users, and activities without the constraints of infrastructure limits. This transition not only cuts down on hardware, maintenance, and operational costs but also provides enhanced security features and greater customization options. Adopting GitHub Enterprise Cloud allows Wayfair to focus on security without the burden of managing on-premises servers.

Successfully managing such a large-scale migration under a tight deadline showcases Wayfair's digital transformation maturity, positioning it strongly for future large-scale technology initiatives.

This migration would not have been possible without the Modus Create team.