Amazon CloudSearch allows us to focus on our product by providing a high-performance search back-end for our rapidly growing customer base.

Don MacAskill CEO & Chief Geek

SmugMug is a premium online photo and video sharing service with millions of users storing billions of personal photos and videos. The company operates on a subscription-based model that offers its customers with unlimited photo uploads, safe back-ups, easy sharing, customization, image protection, and privacy features. Using rich metadata generated by photos and videos, customers can search and browse through their content to find what they care about.

• The company built its own search infrastructure using open-source, database technologies.

• Despite using fast on-premise SSD servers and employing engineering best practices, search query times fell as the number of users and amount of content grew.

• Needed to find a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective search solution that would deliver a good customer experience.

• Moved its photo, album, and user search service onto Amazon CloudSearch, migrating years of data and integrating with the simple, REST API for search and display features.

• Designed a solution that could handle user-growth by leveraging Amazon CloudSearch’s auto-scaling feature.

• Designed to deliver consistent low-latency (median below 50 milliseconds) and highly relevant search results to customers, while handling tens of millions of index updates per day.

• Designed to handle 6 TB of rich metadata generated by user uploads over 2 year.

• SmugMug saves more than $300,000 per year in operations and maintenance costs.

• No longer needs to manage a search backend and can now focus valuable developer resources on developing a great photo sharing service.

To learn more about how Amazon CloudSearch, visit the Amazon CloudSearch details page: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/.