Daito Kentaku Partners migrates eheya.net CDN to Amazon CloudFront, slashes costs to one-tenth of previous levels

Operated by Daito Kentaku Partners, the 'eheya.net' rental property web portal has over 620,000 listings (as of April 2026). With its IT infrastructure running on the same platform for nearly 20 years, the site had accumulated technical debt, required prolonged development cycles, and relied on specific engineers. Resources were inflexible and costs had inflated. The company therefore decided to overhaul the architecture.

“The real estate industry’s peak period, January through March, generates about twice as much traffic as the off-peak season,” says Yasuyuki Kakihara, General Manager of the eheya.net Department. “Frequent downtime due to outages during peak periods was ruining the customer experience. We decided to switch to AWS, which has a great track record, for a more robust and stable service.”

The transition to AWS started small in 2020 and was implemented in phases over four years. Shifting the CDN to Amazon CloudFront was one part of a wide range of initiatives, including a user interface overhaul, enhanced account controls, and database migration. Sakuya Inokuma, an Infrastructure Engineer at Red Frasco, which supported the migration, gives details below.

“The CDN’s costs had continued to rise, requiring annual contracts based on peak season demand, and the complex service structure was difficult to trim. However, cost estimates from Amazon CloudFront revealed significant savings potential. On the technical side, the ability to migrate all existing properties on the CDN, replace the image conversion function with Lambda@Edge — Amazon CloudFront’s edge computing solution — and use existing examples for real-time image conversion helped us. Support from AWS edge specialists was also reassuring.”

First, the migration team divided the CDN into two parts, a property image CDN and a site content CDN, to reduce risks when migrating. The key focus was to elevate overall site performance while maintaining the same or better functionality and minimizing risks. For the property image CDN, which accounts for about 80 percent of total bandwidth use, the team leveraged Lambda@Edge to build a system for converting new images in real time. By converting images to WebP/AVIF format using Node.js sharp, sizes more than halved.

Additionally, using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a cache layer for converted images provided storage for a total of 4 million objects (7 TB of images), creating a mechanism to deliver images without origin-side latency.

For the site content CDN, infrastructure-side settings are minimized, leaving cache management to Next.js on the application side for precise control on a screen-by-screen basis.

“By directly controlling caching from the application side, we no longer need our infrastructure department for CDN settings, which increases operational flexibility and development efficiency,” says Takehiro Ishiyama, VP of Engineering at Red Frasco. “We cache all pages of eheya.net in the CDN for a response time of between 10 to 30 ms for cache hits. Even if there’s no hit, the response time reaches around 100 ms.”

Regular meetings with AWS representatives for technical advice accompanied the CDN migration. “I hadn’t used Lambda@Edge before, so I was a bit anxious,” reveals Ishiyama. “However, during development, AWS experts provided sample code for creating functions and advice on various limitations.” Inokuma adds, “We proceeded with confidence thanks to the support of Solution Architects with expertise in CDN and edge computing. For deployment, they advised us on using CDK to manage infrastructure and applications with the same code, which was a great help.”

Since migrating to Amazon CloudFront, CDN costs have dropped to under a tenth of the previous expense, and annual usage fees have plunged to several million yen, massively less than before. Additionally, the property image CDN and real-time image conversion using Lambda@Edge have slashed bandwidth use to under 10 TB, a third of the previous amount.

“The property image CDN makes maintenance and capacity planning virtually unnecessary and provides the convenience of ultra-stable edge computing,” says Inokuma. “The site content CDN requires very little developer maintenance; we’ve only had to make a few configuration changes over a three-year period. Unifying everything with AWS has also reduced operation and monitoring work.”

After migrating to AWS and overhauling the entire IT infrastructure, including the CDN, eheya.net is more stable and reliable.

“In the past, the time of day and busy periods affected service stability,” says Kakihara. “But now, display latency and access failures are extremely rare. Site usage has grown enormously, and the number of inquiries, which we set as an important KPI, climbed 1,760 percent between 2020 and 2025, elevating our business presence. This has expanded our franchise business, with franchisee numbers steadily ascending. Going forward, we’ll continue to enhance our services and create new customer experiences with AI.”

Following the CDN migration, Daito Kentaku Partners has continued to enhance the architecture, using Amazon CloudFront Functions to conduct A/B testing to polish the site’s user interface and adding a mechanism to generate multiple cache patterns. On the subject of further optimization and expanded functionality, Ishiyama says the company will devise image transformation parameters in Lambda@Edge for better image quality and performance.

Other plans include enhancing the overall architecture of eheya.net with stronger security, and automated troubleshooting through AWS DevOps Agents.

“Our real estate site and other customer-facing sites confront a variety of malicious access like cyberattacks, and there are limits to what humans alone can handle,” explains Inokuma. “We’d therefore like to supplement log analysis and anomaly detection with AWS DevOps Agents to boost site safety while also increasing operational efficiency.”