About Salefreaks

Salefreaks helps corporations, business owners, and individual marketplace sellers to source millions of new goods into their online stores, and access new potential buyers, driving eCommerce sales and protecting margins. Working closely with Amazon and eBay, the company develops and uses advanced automation software solutions that rapidly analyze, source, test, and deploy smart listing, pricing, inventory, and drop shipping strategies, at scale.

Salefreaks currently manages over 2500 eBay stores, with over 8 million items listed and over 450,000 items sold monthly.

 

The Challenge

Salesfreaks’ architecture comprises several database clusters with tens of databases and hundreds of application servers, all exposed to the public internet due to the limitations of the company’s existing provider. With a massive compute requirement, both for serving its customers and to power its internal task processing, Salefreaks’ Cloud hosting cost became extremely high.  The decision was made to migrate to AWS, which offered the required capacity on spot instances, scalability, cost-effective pricing plans, a secured network and a simple-to-use managed database service.

The Solution

Working with CloudZone, Salesfreaks embarked on migration of its servers to AWS, some of them using “lift and shift” approach and some with minor application modernization.

• Cost-effective environment – the 700-800 worker servers that Salefreaks was using for its application processes were migrated to spot instances, giving the company better pricing while still providing the required capacity.
• Scalability – in order to achieve the scalability required to serve its growing customer base, Salefreaks migrated its servers to AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which offers security, autoscaling and resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
• Securing the network – following CloudZone’s recommendation, a secure VPC was built for the environment according to best practices, with proper network segmentation into public and private subnets. This has enabled the company to securely enclose its network, according to specific subnets and security groups, such that, other than servers that should be public, all core systems were protected.
• Optimizing storage – implementing Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage, archiving and retrieval has given Salesfreaks a range of benefits, including scalability, data availability, security and performance.
• Reduce administrator overheads – using Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS), Salesfreaks is now enjoying the benefits of a fully-managed service that provides out of the box backups, high availability and other benefits, with less administrative input by its own staff.

The Results 

Now with 700 to 1300 servers operating every day, Salesfreaks is able to run its Cloud environment in a scalable and flexible way, thanks to AWS.  Autoscaling immediately facilitates server availability when required, enabling the company to provide a faster response to client demand while paying only for the exact amount of time the server is uses the Cloud, rather than a fixed daily or monthly cost regardless of usage. This is saving Salesfreaks in the region of $20,000 per month.

“With AWS, not only is it easier for us to manage our Cloud environment, but we have the scalability we need to respond to client demand, and a level of security – both networking and administrative – that accords with AWS best practices,” says Nitsan Goren, co-founder, and CTO of Salesfreaks. “We are now able to deliver a highly-available application, whereby an outage even of several components will not result in the whole system crashing. Downtime is down to almost zero and incident response time has decreased, meaning that our clients enjoy continuous, uninterrupted service.”

 

The project went live in June 2019.