CustomInk - Customer Case Study

Custom Ink enables people to design and order custom t-shirts and gear for their clubs, companies, charities, family reunions, and more. Custom Ink got started using AWS Lambda for server automation tasks including starting and stopping non-critical servers and managing backups. These automation tasks worked well in production, and the company decided to migrate their clipart and graphics service to AWS Lambda. This service allows customers to apply a number of effects (flip, rotate, palette swaps), to their own artwork or any piece of clipart in the Custom Ink library. The migration took three months to complete and has now reduced their costs by a factor of 90% and increased service reliability, with a 0.005 error rate for 2,000 requests per minute. Custom Ink benefits from AWS Lambda's automatic scaling, and keeps bad requests from affecting overall service health better than if they were managing it independently. A serverless architecture allows Custom Ink to handle peak traffic without alerts, and let customers generate high DPI clipart and recover from bad user uploads without manual intervention. By using a serverless approach, Custom Ink was able to reduce the cost of the platform, and increase its scalability and availability. The operations team can now focus on other areas since they no longer need to constantly manage the service.