Case Study: Nextdoor achieves 50% lower site latency and faster product launches with Amazon Web Services

NextDoor - Customer Case Study

Nextdoor is a private neighborhood social network founded in San Francisco in 2010. The company needed a fast, reliable, and secure platform to keep members engaged (including during crises), let developers focus on product features instead of infrastructure, scale quickly as a growing startup, isolate environments for safety, and improve analytics to personalize the user experience.

Nextdoor runs its full stack on AWS — using EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudFront, CloudWatch, VPC peering across regions, CloudFormation, S3 (30 TB), and Redshift for analytics — plus automation tools like Puppet and RightScale. The move delivered measurable gains: switching to C3 instances cut user-perceived latency by 50% and reduced server costs by 20%, enabled rapid provisioning (thousands of servers and test environments in hours), sub-minute rollbacks, strong multi-VPC isolation, and analytics-driven insights for product improvements.

NextDoor

Matt Wise

Sr. Systems Architect