Key Outcomes
Overview
Airtasker is an Australian technology company that helps people get everyday work done. Its online marketplace connects customers with independent taskers for services ranging home maintenance to digital work. Airtasker operates across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States with thousands of tasks posted and delivered daily.
As a commission-based marketplace, Airtasker depends on cost-efficient operations to support platform growth and continued technology differentiation in market. As transaction volumes increased and the company prepared to expand market share globally, Airtasker identified the need for a flexible infrastructure consumption model that could elastically scale service with demand.
By building on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances for production workloads, Airtasker successfully aligned infrastructure spending closely with business outcomes to maintain flexibility as its marketplace grew. This has resulted in a highly cost optimized production environment, which can elastically scale on demand, whilst maintaining uninterrupted customer experience.
About Airtasker
Airtasker is an Australian technology company with a global marketplace that helps people get everyday work done. The platform links users with freelancers for home and digital tasks across Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Opportunity | Using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to optimize costs at Airtasker
As Airtasker's marketplace expanded to more than 2 million users and about 1.3 million active taskers, the company needed to rethink how infrastructure efficiency supported growth. With plans to increase its presence in the US and UK, Airtasker focused on building an operating model designed for flexibility and scale from the outset. By coupling infrastructure spend to consumption, the company identified an opportunity to align costs more closely with how demand changed over time.
To support this approach, Airtasker evaluated alternative compute pricing models on AWS and selected Amazon EC2 Spot Instances complemented with a small number of reserved instances running Karpenter, an open-source Kubernetes autoscaling tool. Amazon EC2 Spot Instance provide access to surplus Amazon EC2 capacity at a lower cost than on-demand pricing, with the trade-off that AWS can reclaim these compute intances at short notice.
Solution | Turning cost-efficiency into a scalable operating model
Airtasker reduced annual compute costs by US$142,000 while continuing to support more than 40,000 weekly transactions across its marketplace. The company reinvested these savings into product development and a dedicated Site Reliability Engineering teams, solidifying operational maturity.
Airtasker adopted a Spot-first compute model on AWS and now runs production compute workloads almost entirely on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. This shift moved the platform away from fixed, always-on infrastructure and helped keep infrastructure costs aligned with actual demand as usage fluctuates.
To manage application workloads, Airtasker uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This fully managed Kubernetes service runs and scales containerized applications on AWS. This setup supports workload movement as Spot capacity changes at short notice, helping the platform operate smoothly throughout the week.
Outcome | Preparing the platform for continued expansion
Airtasker will continue building out its Spot-first operations model as it grows into international markets. The focus remains on improving automation and operational consistency whilst keeping costs to a minimum as the platform evolves.
Airtasker also plans to deepen its use of artificial intelligence (AI) services on AWS to support continued product development and more efficient operations. This includes additional ways to streamline infrastructure management as the platform evolves.
"AWS helped us turn cost discipline into a growth advantage. By running production on Spot Instances, we can scale globally while investing more in the product and the people who power our marketplace," said Chaitanya Kuber, Chief Technology Officer at Airtasker.
AWS helped us turn cost discipline into a growth advantage. By running production on Spot Instances, we can scale globally while investing more in the product and the people who power our marketplace.
Chaitanya Kuber
Chief Technology Officer, AirtaskerAWS Services Used
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