Case Study: SmugMug achieves scalable, low-latency search and $300K/year savings with Amazon Web Services (Amazon CloudSearch)

SmugMug - Customer Case Study

SmugMug is a subscription-based photo and video sharing service with millions of users and billions of items of content. As its user base and metadata grew, SmugMug’s home-built search stack on SSD-backed servers began to slow, and the company needed a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective search solution to maintain fast, relevant search for customers.

SmugMug migrated its photo, album, and user search to Amazon CloudSearch, using CloudSearch’s REST API and auto-scaling to handle growth and years of existing data. The move delivered median latencies below 50 ms while supporting tens of millions of index updates per day and ~6 TB of metadata over two years, eliminated the need to manage a search backend, and saved SmugMug more than $300,000 annually in operations and maintenance.

SmugMug

Don MacAskill

Chief Executive Officer & Chief Geek