SmugMug is a premium online photo and video sharing service with millions of users storing billions of personal photos and videos. The company operates on a subscription-based model that offers its customers with unlimited photo uploads, safe back-ups, easy sharing, customization, image protection, and privacy features. Using rich metadata generated by photos and videos, customers can search and browse through their content to find what they care about.
• The company built its own search infrastructure using open-source, database technologies.
• Despite using fast on-premise SSD servers and employing engineering best practices, search query times fell as the number of users and amount of content grew.
• Needed to find a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective search solution that would deliver a good customer experience.
• Moved its photo, album, and user search service onto Amazon CloudSearch, migrating years of data and integrating with the simple, REST API for search and display features.
• Designed a solution that could handle user-growth by leveraging Amazon CloudSearch’s auto-scaling feature.
• Designed to deliver consistent low-latency (median below 50 milliseconds) and highly relevant search results to customers, while handling tens of millions of index updates per day.
• Designed to handle 6 TB of rich metadata generated by user uploads over 2 year.
• SmugMug saves more than $300,000 per year in operations and maintenance costs.
• No longer needs to manage a search backend and can now focus valuable developer resources on developing a great photo sharing service.
To learn more about how Amazon CloudSearch, visit the Amazon CloudSearch details page: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/.