Case Study: Poshmark achieves rapid launch and elastic scalability for real-time social shopping with Amazon Web Services

Poshmark - Customer Case Study

Poshmark is a social shopping app (founded in 2011) that lets users buy, sell, and share fashion through mobile and web clients and hosts real-time "Posh Parties" with tens of thousands of listings. The founders needed fast iteration, personalized image-rich feeds, social interactions, and the ability to scale for large real-time events while avoiding the time and cost of on-premises hardware.

Poshmark built on AWS for its broad, API-driven services—using JRuby APIs, EC2/ELB/Tomcat, S3 and CloudFront for media, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Route 53, SNS, and CloudWatch—keeping production and staging separate to accelerate testing. The result: a working app in 3 months, market launch in 8 months and rapid national rollout, the ability to scale elastically for peak Posh Parties (up to ~50k users), and a 12-person engineering team running a DevOps approach with no dedicated operations staff.

Poshmark

Gautam Golwala

Co-Founder