Modern times have seen post offices around the world struggling to remain relevant as digital communication becomes more and more dominant, with shipping of orders from online-based distributors becoming an increasingly prominent part of their business model. For Singapore Post Ltd. (SingPost), its eCommerce division has been instrumental in keeping them current in these changing times.

Hosts Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, were able to sit down at the Amazon re:Invent 2015 event with Roland Oberdorfer, chief architect of SingPost eCommerce, to ask about SingPost’s move to digital grounds, its process of international localization for companies and the way Amazone Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has been used along the way.

Host platforms

In the beginning, SingPost ran its own data-center, but as the need for something scalable became apparent, the company turned to Amazon. As Oberdorfer put it, Amazon was a natural choice due to its existing global footprint and the option to begin at a small level of operations before expanding.

Now, as SingPost works to move its own clientele over to cloud servers, providing an end-to-end service to get its customers’ sites up and running, the various services of AWS are being used together to create personalized environments based on usage needs. “You can quickly see if something works, and if not … delete that environment, or adjust it,” Oberdorfer said.

Spikes and scaling

SingPost still runs its own data-center, but more and more of the data kept there is finding its way over to its cloud-side storage. The company’s eCommerce division itself was started solely on cloud services, which has kept them comfortable as new applications emerge. As many of SingPost’s clients run retail venues, the auto-scaling bandwidth features, in particular, have been of extreme helpfulness in dealing with the traffic spikes from November to December.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Amazon re:Invent 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE