Case Study: PlaceIQ achieves 83% faster response times and cost savings with Amazon Web Services (Amazon ElastiCache)

PlaceIQ - Customer Case Study

PlaceIQ, founded in 2010, delivers location intelligence for mobile advertising through its PlaceContext product, which analyzes large volumes of place, event, mobile and social data to infer audience presence. Facing real‑time, mobile-scale demands, the company needed a highly scalable caching layer because its back end previously forwarded every request to fulfillment servers, risking latency and inefficiency.

PlaceIQ implemented Amazon ElastiCache (memcached) with an Nginx caching proxy layer and Elastic Load Balancing—hashing request URIs to specific cache nodes to avoid redundant copies and forwarding misses to origin servers—while using Route 53, CloudWatch, and SNS for routing and monitoring. The change cut average end-to-end response times by 83%, reduced backend server needs, and saved about $1,000 per month in direct costs.

PlaceIQ

Steve Milton

CTO and Co-Founder