YOUGotaGift Accelerates Innovation Using Amazon EKS and Amazon Aurora Global Database

The concept of YOUGotaGift originated in 2013, when Husain Makiya, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), found himself in need of a last-minute gift card for a birthday party. To his surprise, there were no local online stores offering a quick and easy solution. Within months, he launched YOUGotaGift to provide consumers in the Middle East with online access to digital gift cards. Soon, the company expanded to also serve the business-to-business (B2B) space, where it succeeded in creating branded currencies for companies.

In 2017, YOUGotaGift developed its gifting platform using a local cloud provider but it wasn’t happy with the reliability or level of customer support it received. “We encountered issues with our local provider and made the decision to migrate to another provider,” says Ashin K N, chief technology officer at YOUGotaGift “After evaluating multiple cloud providers and considering our requirements and use case, we ultimately chose to use AWS.”

The company decided to lift and shift its monolithic application but as the business grew, YOUGotaGift needed to optimize its infrastructure to be more agile and allow it to keep pace with market demands. At the time, YOUGotaGift wasn’t able to release products quickly because its aging infrastructure was complex and slow to scale. The company decided to containerize its application and use microservices.

YOUGotaGift uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service. Using Amazon EKS, the company has improved the performance, scalability, and reliability of its infrastructure. “Previously, during a traffic spike, scaling would take at least 3 minutes,” says Shameem Khalid, director of cloud engineering at YOUGotaGift. “Now, using Amazon EKS, it takes less than 1 minute, and within 2 minutes we can have thousands of containers to handle millions of requests.”

YOUGotaGift chose to migrate to Amazon Aurora (Aurora), a database designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Khalid says Aurora is one of the most important pieces of YOUGotaGift’s infrastructure, because of its performance, scalability, and security. “I highly recommend Aurora to anyone,” he says. “We can easily deep dive into the system and see what is going on. In 3 years we never had any downtime—it’s been a hero service.”

As part of a second optimization project in 2020, the company migrated to Amazon Aurora Serverless, an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for the database. Khalid says the serverless database allows YOUGotaGift to affordably scale its platform to operate in numerous countries. “If I were only allowed to use one AWS service, it would be Amazon Aurora Serverless,” says Khalid. “It’s fast and reliable, we can have thousands of concurrent connections from different regions, and it scales up and down according to demand, so it’s cost-effective.”

With its new serverless database and containerized application, YOUGotaGift found that its technical team was far more productive than before. Deploying new features or making changes to the platform took 90 percent less time because the company has more confidence in its infrastructure and platform. “Previously, any update had to be tested in many phases and undergo several reviews before it could be safely sent live,” says Khalid. “Now, instead of taking at least 20 minutes, updates take less than 5 minutes.”

The company also migrated from its own analysis and business intelligence (BI) tool to Amazon QuickSight, which provides business intelligence and helps companies make better data-driven decisions. Ashin says QuickSight speeds up development and increases productivity. “Before we used QuickSight, we would have to create unique dashboards for each product,” says Ashin. “Now, those dashboards are created automatically.”

YOUGotaGift’s platform is more reliable and operations are streamlined using AWS. “We have five people managing our entire cloud infrastructure,” says Ashin. “If we were not using AWS and this diverse range of services, we would need about 15 engineers to build and maintain the services in-house. Using AWS has helped us reduce development times and also cut costs.”

YOUGotaGift’s cloud system components now operate independently while also being able to communicate with each other, which means that unlike its previous infrastructure, problems in one area do not cascade into a system-wide failure. “Before using Amazon EKS and Amazon Aurora, our apps had an internal dependency on each other,” says Khalid. “If one fell over, it would affect everything else. Now we have a microservices-based infrastructure, and although our services are all connected, they are independent and more resilient.”

The company will continue using AWS as it expands further. “Migrating our cloud infrastructure to AWS was a transformative journey that reshaped our business and catapulted our growth,” says YOUGotaGift’s CEO Husain Makiya. “Using AWS, we’ve achieved exponential growth, unmatched scalability, and gained unwavering client trust.”