AWS Case Study: AiCache and Woot.com

Periodically Woot announces a “Woot-Off”, a short term frenzied mutation of the product posting procedure. In Woot-Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous deal. As the news about Woot-offs goes viral in just a few short minutes, traffic to Woot’s website spikes to tens of thousands of connections a second. These orders-of-magnitude spikes can overwhelm Woot’s datacenter.

Woot.com needed a solution that would not require a massive investment in additional hardware, software, and support. The AWS pay-as-you-go model enabled Woot to choose a cloud based solution over additional capital expenditure. Woot chose aiCache Web Accelerator as a pre-configured instance from the Amazon Solutions Catalog. Woot turned on the instances and moved all traffic to the aiCache accelerators.

Using the flexible caching configuration of the aiCache software, Woot accomplished a caching ratio of 96%. This means that while thousands of requests a second are fulfilled by aiCache, barely any load trickles through to Woot’s datacenter. Woot now uses their load balancer to move all Woot-off traffic from their datacenter to the aiCache instances in the cloud. Once complete, they scale back the instances on Amazon reducing the cost.

“With less than a day’s work total, we were able to configure aiCache for use during Woot- Offs. Our site stays up under the crush, and we’ve saved quite a bit on hardware purchases and time spent optimizing,” said Luke Duff Retail manager at Woot.com. Woot.com was founded by electronics wholesaler Matt Rutledge. Woot debuted on July 12, 2004 quickly becoming one of the Internet’s most successful sites.

aiCache.com helps top-tier web sites scale while reducing cost, enabling mobile aware Web Application Acceleration for the datacenter and Cloud.

aiCache on AWS: http://aicache.com/cloud_amazon.html
aiCache Wiki: http://wiki.aicache.com