ShopBack Case Study
ShopBack, the leading rewards and discovery platform in Asia Pacific, allows users to earn cashback while delivering performance-based marketing to merchants. First launched in Singapore in 2014, ShopBack has since expanded its reach to nine markets.
Looking for cost reductions as well as improved scalability and reliability, ShopBack discovered Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in 2019. Using Spot Instances for various stateless applications allowed the company to increase scalability and reduce its infrastructure costs by 60 percent. Being able to scale out at drastically reduced costs enabled ShopBack to process more customer transactions concurrently within budget, helping customers get their cashback faster. This translated to happier customers and busier merchants, improving the company’s profitability. ShopBack can now process customer cashback faster using fewer internal resources.
In 2018, the company adopted Kubernetes and containerization using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which helped ShopBack scale more effectively and improve resilience, but the startup still required greater cost-efficiency.
“The amount of money we have to spend on server costs to generate cashback for our customers is significantly lower with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.”
David Chua
Engineering Manager, ShopBack
Benefits of AWS
- Reduces infrastructure costs by 60%
- Enables expansion into additional markets
- Increases app/site usage fourfold
- No longer experiences site outages caused by traffic spikes
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
7x fewer downtime hours than the next largest cloud provider*
Millions of customers ranging from enterprises to startups
24 regions and 76 availability zones globally
300+ instances for virtually every business need.
Building Blocks
Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest choice of instances, built on the latest compute, storage, and networking technologies and engineered for high performance and security.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types — optimized for memory, performance or I/O — and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. You can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.
Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Customers such as Intel, Snap, Intuit, GoDaddy, and Autodesk trust EKS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability.
EKS is the best place to run Kubernetes for several reasons:
- You can choose to run your EKS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
- EKS is deeply integrated with services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling Groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), providing you a seamless experience to monitor, scale, and load-balance your applications.
- EKS integrates with AWS App Mesh and provides a Kubernetes native experience to consume service mesh features and bring rich observability, traffic controls and security features to applications.
- EKS provides a scalable and highly-available control plane that runs across multiple availability zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant so you can leverage all benefits of open source tooling from the community. You can also easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to EKS without needing to refactor your code.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads. Because Spot Instances are tightly integrated with AWS services such as Auto Scaling, EMR, ECS, CloudFormation, Data Pipeline and AWS Batch, you can choose how to launch and maintain your applications running on Spot Instances.
Moreover, you can easily combine Spot Instances with On-Demand, RIs and Savings Plans Instances to further optimize workload cost with performance. Due to the operating scale of AWS, Spot Instances can offer the scale and cost savings to run hyper-scale workloads. You also have the option to hibernate, stop or terminate your Spot Instances when EC2 reclaims the capacity back with two-minutes of notice. Only on AWS, you have easy access to unused compute capacity at such massive scale — all at up to a 90% discount.
