gocomo Migrates Social Data Platform to AWS for Performance and Scalability with Ankercloud

gocomo migrated its social data analytics platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better performance and greater scalability. The company helps its customers make sense of the huge amount of data on social platforms and deliver actionable insights. But as its client base grew and the richness of the data it collected increased, it found it challenging to deploy and manage the storage and analysis capabilities that customers required. When it struggled with performance, scaling, and rising costs with its previous cloud provider, it turned to AWS Partner Ankercloud to help it re-engineer its platform using Amazon Redshift on AWS.

Based in Berlin, Germany, gocomo is a fast-growing marketing analytics platform for companies using social media and influencer marketing to promote their brands. To do this, the company ingests, stores, and analyzes huge amounts of social media data to help clients understand how their brands and advertising campaigns are perceived and are performing online.

The company’s IT team was having issues with its systems, which were hosted on a large cloud provider. The team was struggling with the stability of the cloud provider’s database, and costs were increasing constantly. “There were times when we had to manually restart the system six times a day,” says Haris Bravo, head of development at gocomo. “We also found that our main database became expensive once initial discounts ended and our data began to grow.” The company was also experiencing challenges with the speed and accuracy of data.

gocomo decided to work with AWS Partner Ankercloud to re-engineer its systems and migrate to AWS. By working with Ankercloud, gocomo gained access to funding and discounts from the AWS Jumpstart Program, aimed at getting startups up and running on AWS, and AWS Activate Program which has helped more than 280,000 startups move from idea to launch.

As the two companies began to investigate the data, and the type of queries that could be run on AWS, they realized that it was possible to be more ambitious with gocomo’s data analysis. They decided that Amazon Redshift, which offers the best price-performance for cloud data warehousing, was a better fit for what they needed rather than Amazon OpenSearch, as originally planned. “In our initial discussions with gocomo we considered Amazon OpenSearch, but together we came to the conclusion that Amazon Redshift was going to give better insights,” says Judith Evers, head of cloud engagement at Ankercloud. “We are agile and always want to serve our customers best, so it was easy to pivot to Amazon Redshift.”

Ankercloud used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere—to scale storage resources to meet gocomo’s fluctuating needs. AWS Glue, which lets you discover, prepare, and integrate all your data at any scale, was chosen for pre-processing data and for extract, transform, and load. Using AWS means gocomo doesn’t need to worry about infrastructure. It can onboard new customers more quickly and work with ever-richer datasets.

Easy scalability was vital to the success of the infrastructure because the volume of data that gocomo collects continues to grow. Currently able to host and process 10 TB of data, its new systems can offer good service levels at up to 20 TB—which it predicts it will reach by the end of 2024. gocomo must deal with this growth while also complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other relevant regulations on data privacy and security. But even more important is the speed with which gocomo can now manage data and get results back to customers. “The faster we can create reports and the fresher that data is, the better the service for our customers,” says Bravo. “But it also means greater efficiency—we can do more. Getting rid of database bottlenecks means we’re creating reports 50 percent faster.”

Working with Ankercloud on AWS, gocomo has almost completely automated the data pipeline for some of its services. Its staff is working on creating a workflow around a brand or other project with a few clicks of a mouse. Systems are so easy to use, gocomo is considering a self-service solution that customers could access directly.

gocomo sees big possibilities for increasing the use of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to its analytics offering. It is using Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy ML models and is evaluating Amazon Bedrock, the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.

What gocomo really values is the innovation that AWS can help support. “The AWS stack and the AWS services toolkit that we have available definitely makes it a lot easier for us to be innovative in our space,” says Bravo. “Our biggest challenge is providing our clients with new insights and fresh perspectives—that’s what our clients want and that’s what AWS helps us provide.” The success of the project was also a result of the relationship with Ankercloud. “Whatever questions we had, Ankercloud was really proactive about getting us the right person to talk to,” says Bravo. “Whenever we had an issue, they did a great job of mitigating the impact and the cost and finding us a good solution.”