123RF Technology Empowers Developers to Solve Business Challenges with AWS Training and Certification

As demand for digital marketing continues to rise, the need for high-quality media has likewise increased—content creators require a steady supply of a range of high-quality visuals to support their content strategies. However, obtaining these visuals from scratch can be time-consuming, not to mention, costly.

Launched in 2005, digital stock agency 123RF Technology has a library of more than 170 million stock images, photos, vectors, videos, and music files from over 300,000 contributors.

 As 123RF grew its business, it constantly hit limits with its on-premises storage and looked to migrate to the cloud for more scalable capacity. In 2020, the company migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of the flexibility and the assistance that AWS offered. “We really valued the proactive support that AWS provided from the start,” says Phoebe Liew, chief technology officer at 123RF Technology.

Liew saw that gaps in AWS knowledge among developers were slowing down migrations of on-premises workloads to the AWS Cloud. She realized that by working with AWS Training and Certification, 123RF could close these gaps and accelerate its migration. Plus, developers would gain greater insight and confidence to explore the different AWS solutions available to solve their business challenges.

Furthermore, investing in upskilling developers would also help the company retain existing talents. Liew explains that employees, “are keen to improve and progress their careers.” In addition, the training program would be attractive to new recruits locally, while giving 123RF peace of mind that developers had the essential AWS capabilities to integrate the latest AWS services as they came to market.

123RF invested in classroom training, taught by AWS experts, to help employees build their cloud skills. The training included Developing on AWS, which focused on AWS SDKs for creating secure and scalable cloud applications. For three days, they learned about interacting with AWS using code, key concepts, best practices, and troubleshooting.

In addition to the classroom training, AWS delivered informal learning opportunities to help solidify the cloud skills of 123RF staff. These included a simulation challenge designed to help small teams solve business challenges together. Plus, workshops and competitions helped immerse tech builders in real-world business scenarios to put their new skills into action.

By expanding their cloud skills, developers were able to help minimize the number of abandoned carts, which leads to lost in revenue. 123RF turned its focus towards ways to improve its customer experience. Liew says, “We wanted developers to think more creatively, build customer-focused solutions from scratch, and make the process as efficient as possible.”

Using Amazon Pinpoint, developers created a multi-step user engagement experience where events triggered messages via email or push notification channels, encouraging users to check out. “Our developers built a great demo in Amazon Pinpoint in just a couple of days using the skills they’ve acquired from the AWS Training and Certification program, and we’re now planning to put this into production,” says Liew.

Through AWS Training and Certification, 123RF is accelerating the migration of its remaining on-premises workloads to the AWS Cloud. Its IT team completed the Developing on AWS course in February 2021, and is preparing for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional exam, with some members having already achieved the certification. “It’s been a dream of ours to get our developers to not only code but also manage infrastructure,” says Liew. “Now that they have a strong grasp on multiple AWS services, we can accelerate the migration process by 35 percent.”

Using its new skill sets, the development team is also driving a move to microservices for increased performance and agility. Developers gained the knowledge to incorporate AWS services such as Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and AWS Lambda into workflows for efficient process workloads. Furthermore, they were able to adopt autoscaling to reduce management time.

With its increased confidence, the team also added AWS Fargate to manage the servers behind the microservices containers. “We’ve been able to train our team to be full stack developers and move closer to getting our workloads onto microservices,” Liew comments.

Moreover, the developers powering the evolution of 123RF are realizing their full potential, seeing what they can achieve as they increase their knowledge of AWS. “AWS Training and Certification program opened their eyes to the technology that’s out there and makes them want to learn more,” says Liew.

Plus, 123RF is well positioned to retain its digital talents and attract junior developers who are increasingly in demand across Malaysia. “AWS Training and Certification is helping us build their knowledge and value to our business,” concludes Liew.