Case Study: Outsmart scales to 1M monthly users and halves per-user costs with Amazon Web Services

Outsmart - Customer Case Study

Outsmart 2005 Ltd., maker of the 3D virtual world SmallWorlds and its Brazilian variant MiniMundos, is an Auckland-based online entertainment company serving about 15 million users with roughly 30 employees. Facing large daily traffic spikes that outgrew its hosting—causing outages, rising data limits and a cap at ~400,000 active users—Outsmart needed a dynamically scalable, cost-effective infrastructure to maintain performance without wasting resources.

Outsmart migrated to AWS, using Amazon S3, CloudFront, Route 53, EC2 (with EBS Provisioned IOPS for MySQL), Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to run 50–120 instances per environment and add capacity as needed. The move boosted support to 1,000,000 monthly active users, cut cost per active user by about 50%, reduced peak latency by ~20%, improved performance overall and delivered greater stability with lower operating costs.

Outsmart

Nick Langstone

Operations Manager