Customer Stories / Travel
Camplify Optimizes Scaling on AWS to Support Continuous Growth
Camplify automates application and analytics scaling with AWS Fargate and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, allowing developers to spend more time on innovation while uncovering new customer insights.
4,000%
hourly increase in web traffic
6 weeks
Mobile app design and deployment time
Productivity Gains
Frees up developers to innovate new features
3x
Supports a threefold increase in app downloads
Overview
Camplify, founded in Newcastle, Australia, is a growing online caravan and motorhome sharing platform connecting van owners with community members seeking to hire recreation vehicles. To ensure website scalability and obtain value from its data, Camplify runs its containerized application environment on AWS.
The company uses AWS Fargate serverless technology and AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and scale its web applications. With these services, Camplify can support global business growth, scale automatically to meet increases in web traffic, and better understand its customers.
Opportunity | Seeking Elasticity to Respond Quickly to Market Changes
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.
We’re always looking at our data to understand how people are using, or might use, a particular feature, and AWS improves our ability to do that.”
Jonathan Milgate
Chief Technology Officer, Camplify
Solution | Accelerating Innovation with Automated Container Scaling
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.
Outcome | Driving Global Growth and New App Development
Since modernizing on AWS, Camplify has freed up its developers to focus on new features. “AWS Fargate provides zero-downtime deployment and allows us to focus on what matters most: building better features for our customers,” Milgate says. With on-demand scaling, business can shut down instances when traffic drops to control costs.
Camplify is also using its AWS-based analytics platform to derive new insights from customer data. It plans to enhance the platform even further in the next 12 months. “We’re always looking at our data to understand how people are using or might use a particular feature, and AWS improves our ability to do that,” says Milgate. Camplify is also exploring the use of machine-learning technologies such as Amazon SageMaker to build new recommendation engines.
The company will continue to take advantage of AWS to expand its global presence. Camplify Holdings Limited (CHL) recently acquired peer-to-peer motorhome and campervan rental companies Mighway and ShareACamper in New Zealand and has its eyes on new regions. It also recently acquired PaulCamper, a leading European van sharing platform, strengthening CHL's global position. Particularly so in Europe where PaulCamper is the market leader in Germany with operations in Austria, the UK, and Netherlands. The acquisition solidifies CHL's position as one of the largest global peer-to-peer marketplaces, doubling the size of the business and expanding its operations to seven countries. “Our plan is to grow our customer base worldwide,” Milgate says. “AWS gives us the performance, high availability, and scalability we need to do that.”
Learn More
To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/serverless.
About Camplify
Camplify, based in Australia, connects holidaymakers with local vans, caravans, motorhomes, and campers to book for their outdoor adventure or vacation. The company helps more than 10,000 vehicle owners who are seeking to share their vehicles for supplemental income.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 500 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. AWS Fargate is compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
Learn more »
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk is a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. Upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment—from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto scaling to application health monitoring.
Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud.
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