Fast-growing social network for followers of fashion using AWS advantage to compete with bigger players
Fast-growing social network for followers of fashion using AWS advantage to compete with bigger players
Fashiolista recently took on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to grow it business and become one of the largest global fashion communities over the last few months.
Described as the "Twitter for fashion," Fashiolista is designed to help shoppers save and share their favourite fashion finds from all over the web in a single place. With their special "love" button, shoppers can create personal profiles, while also browsing the profiles created by other members.
Cloud investment pays off
Prior to switching to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) in March 2012, the company was running its own hardware in a data centre in Amsterdam. Thierry Schellenbach, Fashiolista founder and chief technology officer, told Retail Technology: “We moved to have greater flexibility in terms of server architecture and setting up highly available components.”
The cloud-based IT infrastructure has enabled it to scale quickly and roll out big campaigns without major upfront investment. “As a startup in a rapidly changing environment you need to move fast. That means you need to be able to adjust your infrastructure to changing and growing demands,” Schellenbach said.
“Amazon improves our time to market and allows us to compete with competitors with vastly bigger budgets and teams,” he added.
Boosting user experience
The startup founder also said, in the past, there was often a large correlation between site performance and user activity. But, since switching to AWS, improvements in infrastructure availability and performance led to a 15-20% change. “Amazon has helped lift Fashiolista to a higher level of execution and improved our ability to grow the business,” Schellenbach explained.
He also said the key reason for using AWS is the flexibility it delivers: “With the right tools it becomes trivial to modify entire clusters of infrastructure at once.” And he cited Cloudformation and Boto tools, together with software like Puppet, for enabling the company to automate most of its infrastructure.
Fashiolista is currently researching the possibility of having servers in multiple regions. “Currently we're in Ireland and we would like to expand to Brazil to reduce latency in South America. Such a feat would not be feasible without the automation Amazon's tools enable,” Schellenbach concluded.
