Joonggonara accelerates time-to-market with AWS

Joonggonara processes more than 200,000 items daily via its mobile applications and Naver cafes, but this volume creates the potential for fraud. The company wanted to improve buyers’ confidence in the C2C marketplace and expand its business to the broader Asian market. To achieve this, Joonggonara needed to build infrastructure that provides the security, scalability and flexibility to enable rapid migration of the C2C commerce services from Naver cafes to its mobile application, and minimize disruption to online business operations.

“Customer experience is our priority and we could not afford system failures. By running Amazon Relational Database (Amazon RDS) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), we gained the capability to provide a highly secure, stable and scalable marketplace for users to buy and sell goods without interruption,” says Mr Choi Jeong-Doo, Joonggonara CPO.

Joonggonara evaluated two key aspects of cloud services – access to a skilled workforce and infrastructure support – and decided that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided the availability and stability the business needed to support its growth.

“We are rapidly expanding our business, and adding a lot of staff. Because AWS has a wide base of users, it’s easy to hire IT professionals and developers with the right skill sets,” Mr Choi says.

“We also received comprehensive support from AWS partners, such as MEGAZONE. They helped us in infrastructure design, security configuration, system installation and performance optimization. We have minimized the workload to build and maintain infrastructure. AWS was simply the best choice for us,” Mr Choi adds.

To ensure the stability and availability of its C2C marketplace, Joonggonara applied multi-availability zone for Amazon RDS for MariaDB. The company also utilizes AWS services like big data and machine learning to enhance its product recommendations and detect fraudulent transactions in real time, increasing the reliability of the platform.

“In the case of Naver cafes, customer-related data that we can check are limited. By deploying Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon ElastiCache, we can rapidly collect and analyze all the data we want and provide a better recommendation service. It also enable users to find products quickly and accurately, helping us improve customer satisfaction,” explains Mr Choi.

Another benefit of using AWS is faster time-to-market. “We didn’t have many operational staff or much experience managing infrastructure and platforms. It would have taken four years if we built the system in the traditional way,” Mr Choi says. “Thanks to AWS, we were able to complete everything from development to stabilization in just a year.”

AWS also helped Joonggonara reduce compliance costs. To comply with Korean regulatory requirements for buying and selling used cars, the company had to install a system with its own data center and link with external financial institutions for credit enquiries.

“By using AWS Direct Connect to establish a link between AWS services and our own IDC, we gained consistent network performance compared to leased lines, at a reasonable cost. This allows our users to access all services through the mobile application,” Mr Choi says.