Partner Success with AWS / Retail / Belgium

December 2024
Verbolia
Necko Technologies

Necko Helps Verbolia Deliver 4x More Traffic, 440 Million SEO Pages a Month on AWS

Learn how Necko helped SEO ecommerce company Verbolia scale, grow, and innovate on AWS.

440

million pages delivered every month

4x

more traffic served than before migration

Minutes

not days or weeks to onboard new customers

Zero

downtime for OpenSearch database since launch

Overview

Verbolia is a Belgian scaleup that helps ecommerce companies improve the effectiveness of their marketing. The company’s products help automate SEO and build landing pages to increase organic traffic and improve return on advertising spend (ROAS). Verbolia’s on-premises infrastructure struggled to scale to support the delivery of an ever-increasing number of landing pages. Working with AWS Partner Necko Technologies, the company refactored its products on Amazon Web Services (AWS), based on a foundation of serverless technologies. As a result, it can now deliver over 400 million pages a month in more than 20 countries—4 times more than it could before the migration.

Opportunity | Growing Customer Base Requires Migration to the Cloud

Verbolia’s vision is to establish itself as an essential part of an ecommerce company’s marketing stack. Its two core products help online retailers publish landing pages for multiple web and social platforms to improve SEO presence and drive higher ROAS. After it’s installed, the technology lets marketers, rather than technical teams, easily deploy new pages and optimize them for SEO. The platform then uses automation to improve the pages to ensure they are performing.

This requires a lot of compute power, and Verbolia found itself getting increasingly close to the limitations of what its on-premises infrastructure could deliver. Its hardware was slow to scale, and the company lacked the geo-localized reach it needed to serve its growing global customer base. Verbolia realized that it needed to migrate to the cloud to gain the scalability required to improve the performance of its landing page technology and to support its growth plans. A simple lift and shift would not be enough. Instead, it chose to take the opportunity to refactor its systems on AWS. But the company realized that it would need help to achieve this.

kr_quotemark

As a startup, you need to reinvent yourself all the time. AWS credits meant we were able to implement the first version of the infrastructure and weren’t afraid to make mistakes.”

Pierre-Olivier Danhaive
Chief Executive Officer, Verbolia

Solution | Deploying AWS Services to Gain Scalability and Low Latency

The company’s chief executive officer (CEO) Pierre-Olivier Danhaive had worked with AWS before and had received a recommendation from AWS to work with Necko, also based in Belgium, as the technical delivery partner. Danhaive’s team had a little AWS experience, but he appreciated having Necko’s technical expertise onboard to help it manage the refactoring and migration project. Necko also provided advice about the hundreds of services that AWS offers. “The team at Necko was always available to help,” says Danhaive. “It was important for us to have a local partner as we grew. Trust is important and we knew we could trust the team at Necko.”

The company also benefited from AWS credits in the early stages of the refactoring project as it built and developed a minimum viable product. “As a startup, you need to reinvent yourself all the time,” says Danhaive. “AWS credits meant we were able to implement the first version of the infrastructure and weren’t afraid to make mistakes. In the early stages, mistakes can be expensive.”

Improvements to scalability were addressed by using AWS serverless technologies, including AWS Lambda to make millions of database calls, and Amazon API Gateway to access backend services. Verbolia’s infrastructure is deployed and managed using AWS CloudFormation, which enables the company to speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code (IaC). Necko deployed the company’s workloads in containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). New customers were added directly onto AWS while existing customer databases were migrated to the cloud over a 12-month period. Danhaive estimates that 98 percent of the business now runs on AWS.

Verbolia uses Amazon OpenSearch Service as its core database to store the vast product catalogs of its customers. AWS Lambda makes around 500 million calls per month on Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) databases. Danhaive’s team also appreciates the auto-updating of Amazon OpenSearch Service, which is automated by AWS. Without that, it would need to commit valuable developer time to regular maintenance.

Necko recommended Amazon CloudFront as the content delivery network for serving the millions of landing pages that Verbolia publishes across multiple web and social platforms for its customers. “Amazon CloudFront is a key product for us,” says Danhaive. “The advantage it gives us is that it lets us be closer to our customers in terms of page delivery. That was difficult to achieve on premises with edge caching. Around 80 to 85 percent of our business is outside Belgium, so having the ability to deliver content globally with low latency was very important for us.”

Outcome | Faster Development, 4x the Traffic, and New Customer Onboarding in Minutes

Using Amazon CloudFront on AWS, Verbolia is helping its customers to deliver more high-performing landing pages than ever before. It now serves around 440 million pages every month, 4 times what it could achieve before, in over 20 different countries. Freed from the need to manage servers, Verbolia’s developers can focus more on new code releases and can deploy them to the infrastructure themselves. With the easy deployment and configuration enabled by IaC, they can manage a blue/green environment in which new code, called green, is tested and deployed while old code, called blue, also remains in production until all traffic is transferred from one to the other. This provides backward compatibility in the event of any release issues.

Scalability was critical for Verbolia. Built on serverless infrastructure, the company hasn’t experienced any downtime of its mission-critical Amazon OpenSearch Service or other databases on AWS—this had been an occasional but serious problem with its on-premises system. In addition, the ability to easily scale has simplified new customer onboarding. What previously took days or weeks to achieve can now be completed in just a few minutes with one click. The next steps for Verbolia and Necko are to investigate how Amazon SageMaker can help support its AI SEO generation and bring that AI functionality into its own infrastructure rather than have that delivered by a third party.

About Verbolia

Based in Belgium, Verbolia is an ecommerce innovator with technology that auto-generates SEO-optimized pages to boost organic traffic and paid acquisition conversion rates. It simplifies the enhancement of ecommerce site performance across all platforms without the need for development. Over 100 major ecommerce brands have already benefited from Verbolia’s award-winning SaaS solution.

About AWS Partner Necko Technologies

Belgium-based Necko Technologies offers AWS cloud services, software development, and consulting services. It has a deep expertise in AWS technologies and services and uses a collaborative approach to work with its customers, creating solutions adapted to their specific business needs.

AWS Services Used

Amazon CloudFormation

Speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation.

Learn more »

Amazon SageMaker

Securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds with Amazon CloudFront.

Learn more »

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service securely unlocks real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data for use cases like application monitoring, log analytics, observability, and website search.

Learn more »

Amazon Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, serverless applications.

Learn more »

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