Many industries have been transformed by a shift to the cloud, and the hair-styling profession is no exception. PS Lifestyle, whose business transformed hair salons in assisted senior-living facilities into professional centers and spas, faced a need to convert from a manual process to a more automated one. Cloud platforms provided a major part of the solution.

“PS Lifestyle is looking to bring its internal systems forward,” said Kanji Bates (pictured), senior integration engineer at PS Lifestyle (Salon PS LLC). “They’re trying to bring their services into the present and get away from having to write everything down.”

Bates spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VTUG Winter Warmer event in Foxborough, Massachusetts. They discussed the cloud services being leveraged to retool its operations, options for system backup, and the value of building dialogue inside the user community.

AWS service for web applications

PS Lifestyle is deploying into Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Beanstalk, according to Bates. The AWS offering is designed to deploy and scale web applications developed in a number of different environments, such as Docker or Python. The new system being developed at PS Lifestyle is what Bates described as “between point-of-sale and the internet.”

One of the challenges confronting the information technology team at PS Lifestyle is backup, how to find a standby system to keep the business running in case of an outage. Droplets, a scalable compute platform with add-on security, monitoring and storage, is a possible option, according to Bates.

“We develop in Docker, so it’s pretty easy to pick up and move somewhere else,” he said. “Even if a standby environment is nowhere nearly as powerful, at least it’s still running.”

The PS Lifestyle engineer has also tapped into the user community surrounding cloud and virtualization technologies. “I’ve actually just started up a VMware user group and an AWS user group,” Bates said. “Both of those communities have been fantastic so far.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE