Camplify Optimizes Scaling on AWS to Support Continuous Growth

People across Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom are increasingly turning to Camplify to rent campervans, motorhomes, or caravans to travel across their countries. Camplify is an online community based in Australia that connects vehicle owners with community members seeking to hire vans. To date, the company has helped travelers experience more than 2 million nights under the stars.

The business has been running its platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since launching in 2015. Its founders had global ambitions and wanted to ensure Camplify’s architecture could be easily accessed from anywhere. As the business grew, it realized the need to scale with agility. Demand tended to spike after an ad campaign, for example, or plummet in response to global events affecting travel, such as the 2020 pandemic. During this time, like all travel operators, Camplify’s website experienced large and rapid changes in traffic. To stay competitive, the organization also sought to give its developers more time to focus on creating new features for customers.

Additionally, Camplify wanted to improve its analytics platform to gain new insights into the business. “We’re feeding more data into our platform every day and needed to ensure smooth data processing to understand our product and how people were using it,” says Jonathan Milgate, chief technology officer at Camplify.

Camplify launched its business with a traditional monolith environment, using a client-server database running on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To increase automation and scalability, the company decided to modernize its infrastructure with Docker-based containerized applications. It began using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and scale its homegrown analytics platform and AWS Fargate as a serverless compute engine for containers. 

By automating the scaling of its application infrastructure, Camplify’s developers were able to develop and launch a new mobile app in just six weeks. Milgate says, “We had 10,000 downloads in the first six weeks after launching on the app stores, and we’re up to around 30,000 now. We can have many users log in and book vans, without us having to focus on scale, location, caching, or performance.” 

The company can also scale automatically for large web traffic spikes following new television ads. After running a new ad this year, Camplify witnessed a 4,000 percent increase in web traffic in one hour. “All we needed to do was sit back while AWS Fargate instances automatically scaled up and back down again when traffic subsided. No intervention from our IT team was required,” says Milgate.