Case Study: VivaReal achieves scalable, cost-efficient real-estate marketplace hosting with Amazon Web Services

VivaReal - Customer Case Study

VivaReal began in 2007 as a Bogotá-based real estate start-up and grew into a network of six marketplaces with a central database of about one million properties. As a small team launching a new platform, they faced uncertainty about hardware needs, limited resources for load testing, and the risk and cost of buying or renting the wrong servers for peak loads.

VivaReal built a three-tier architecture on AWS—using 16 EC2 instances running Apache Tomcat, with Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing to scale and provide failover; Amazon SQS to buffer and process large XML property feeds asynchronously; and CloudFront for images. This approach let them scale dynamically, cut infrastructure costs by paying only for resources used, avoid database overloads, and run realistic test environments affordably, supporting reliable growth across multiple markets.

VivaReal

Thomas Floracks

COO