Customer Stories / Professional Services
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Urban Company Accelerates Innovation and Achieves 75% Cost Savings by Leveraging 100% Spot Instances on Amazon ECS
Discover how the biggest professional home services company in India achieved high availability, reliability, and cost-efficiency by fully deploying its Amazon ECS workloads on Spot Instances.
Up to 75%
Reduction in infrastructure costs after moving to using 100% Spot Instances
Up to 50%
Increase in traffic surges handled during peak periods without disruption
Zero
Downtime since deployment on the AWS Cloud
Overview
Urban Company is an India-based software company that operates an online home services platform. The platform provides a range of professional services at customers’ homes, including air-conditioning servicing, home cleaning, haircuts, beauty treatments, and pest control. Operating in India, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the US, the company has over 50,000 trained service professionals serving more than 25 million users.
Urban Company has been on the Amazon Web Services Cloud (AWS Cloud) since 2014. In 2017, the company started deploying Spot Instances for its workloads on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). It has successfully reduced its infrastructure costs by up to 75 percent and are able to handle up to 50% higher than the average user traffic during peak seasons.
Opportunity | Leveraging AWS to Speed Up Innovation and Cut Cost
Urban Company’s mission is to empower millions of service professionals by delivering services at-home in a way that has never been experienced before. Given the seasonality of its business, Urban Company built its services on the AWS Cloud right from its conception. This lets it scale to handle a 50 percent increase in daily visitors during peak periods, and render over 100,000 services each day without any disruptions.
The cost-sensitive nature of home services also means that Urban Company is always seeking ways to reduce on costs. With Spot Instances promising up to 90 percent lower costs compared to On-Demand prices, Urban Company decided to switch to Spot Instances for its Amazon ECS workloads.
By deploying Spot Instances, we can now deliver innovation and best-in-class services at a fraction of the cost. We reinvested those savings to deliver a superior customer experience and expand our services portfolio. As a result, we have been able to meet the needs of our customers, cementing ourselves as one of Asia’s largest home services platform.”
Karan Bansal
Engineering Manager, Urban Company
Solution | Achieving Cost Savings and Faster Time-to-Market for New Features
As all of its applications are on a stateless set up, Urban Company was able to deploy its Amazon ECS workloads on Spot Instances using Spot by NetApp. This saved them up to US$400,000 per month without compromising on elasticity. During Diwali 2022, for instance, it was able to easily scale its infrastructure to accommodate up to a 30 percent increase in traffic surges without disruptions.
“By deploying Spot Instances, we can now deliver innovation and best-in-class services at a fraction of the cost. We reinvested those savings to deliver a superior customer experience and expand our services portfolio. As a result, we have been able to meet the needs of our customers, cementing ourselves as one of Asia’s largest home services platform”, shared Karan Bansal, engineering manager at Urban Company.
Urban Company has also been able to redirect its resources towards delivering faster innovation for its users. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company quickly realized it needed to assure users that the professionals visiting their homes were vaccinated. It built and rolled out new identity and vaccination status verification features within two weeks using a combination of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).
Outcome | Expanding Feature Set and Market Presence
After its success with its Amazon ECS workloads, Urban Company is currently also migrating its workloads on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to Spot Instances with Karpenter.
Looking ahead, the company is exploring other AWS services that will bolster its fraud detection, perimeter, and network security capabilities to improve overall safety, security, and resilience of its platform.
Learn More
To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/.
About Urban Company
Founded in 2014, Urban Company is Asia’s largest technology marketplace for home services. The company offers services such as beauty and spa at home, cleaning, plumbing, carpentry, appliance repair, painting, etc. through its mobile app and website. It operates in 50+ cities in India, the UAE, Singapore and The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It has a partner network of over 50,000 hand-picked service professionals transforming them into organized and high-quality micro-entrepreneurs. This full-stack approach helps the company live up to its promise of delivering high-quality, delightful services at home.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Elastic Container Service
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that simplifies your deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers.
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
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