Case Study: SmugMug achieves scalable, sub-50ms search and $300K/year operations savings with Amazon CloudSearch

SmugMug on Amazon CloudSearch

SmugMug, a premium online photo and video sharing service with millions of users and billions of images, was struggling with a self-built search stack: despite fast on‑prem SSDs and engineering best practices, query times degraded as content and user numbers grew. To deliver a highly available, scalable, and cost‑effective search experience, SmugMug turned to Amazon CloudSearch for a managed search backend.

SmugMug migrated years of photo, album, and user search data to Amazon CloudSearch, integrating via its REST API and leveraging auto‑scaling to handle growth. The move delivered consistent low latency (median below 50 ms), supported tens of millions of index updates per day and roughly 6 TB of rich metadata over two years, eliminated the need to manage a search backend, and saved SmugMug more than $300,000 per year in operations and maintenance.

SmugMug

Don MacAskill

Chief Executive Officer & Chief Geek