Case Study: Citymaps achieves operational efficiency and seamless scalability with Amazon Web Services

Citymaps - Customer Case Study

Citymaps is a New York–based startup that offers a social mapping platform on iOS, Android, and the web, enabling users to create, share, and discover curated maps. With a small engineering team, the company needed to focus on product development rather than infrastructure operations while ensuring it could scale, monitor application response times, error rates, and availability, and perform seamless log analysis in production.

Citymaps built its stack on AWS (EC2 in VPC, ElastiCache for Redis, S3, SNS, and CloudFront) and added Loggly for turnkey application-level log analytics. The combination reduced operational overhead (about 50 hours/month), enabled seamless handling of 400–500% traffic spikes, improved error detection and performance tuning, reduced downtime, and allowed accurate partner-usage attribution for cost modeling.

Citymaps

Bob Matsuoka

CTO