Amazon Elasticsearch Service

At Qrvey we moved from a SaaS application running in AWS to a deployed model where we would deploy the complete infrastructure and code to a customer's AWS account. This created a unique challenge as we were Cloud Native and hence were using a lot of AWS Services like Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Fargate , Amazon Elasticsearch Service, etc. We decided to first build AWS CloudFormation templates to convert all our infrastructure into code. Then created a AWS CloudFormation template that would first generate a AWS CodePipeline into a customer's AWS account. This pipeline would then deploy our Infrastructure AWS CloudFormation template and the code on that Infrastructure. This simplified and completely automated our upgrade process as well.

We send over 20 billion emails a month on behalf of our customers. As a result, we manage hundreds of millions of "suppression" records that track when an email address is invalid as well as when a user unsubscribes or flags an email as spam. This way we can help ensure our customers are only sending email that their recipients want, which boosts overall delivery rates and engagement. We need to support two primary use cases: (1) fast and reliable real-time lookup against the list when sending email and (2) allow customers to search, edit, and bulk upload/download their list via API and in the UI. A single enterprise customer's list can be well over 100 million. Over the years as the size of this data started small and has grown increasingly we have tried multiple things that didn't scale very well. In the recent past we used Amazon DynamoDB for the system of record as well as a cache in Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for the fast lookups and Amazon CloudSearch for the search function. This architecture was overly complicated and expensive. We were able to eliminate the use of Redis, replacing it with direct lookups against DynamoDB, fronted with a stripped down Node.js API that performs consistently around 10ms. The new dynamic bursting of DynamoDB has helped ensure reliable and consistent performance for real-time lookups. We also moved off the clunky and expensive CloudSearch to Amazon Elasticsearch Service for the search functionality. Beyond the high price tag for CloudSearch it also had severe limits streaming updates from DynamoDB, which forced us to batch them - adding extra complexity and CX challenges. We love the fact that DynamoDB can stream directly to ElasticSearch and believe using these two technologies together will handle our scaling needs in an economical way for the foreseeable future.

By streaming data from Dynamodb Elasticsearch provides the dynamic lookups for listings by activity, date, cost, ect. ect, providing a superior enduser experience. Amazon Elasticsearch Service

We initially started out with Heroku as our PaaS provider due to a desire to use it by our original developer for our Ruby on Rails application/website at the time. We were finding response times slow, it was painfully slow, sometimes taking 10 seconds to start loading the main page. Moving up to the next "compute" level was going to be very expensive.

We moved our site over to AWS Elastic Beanstalk , not only did response times on the site practically become instant, our cloud bill for the application was cut in half.

In database world we are currently using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also, we have both MariaDB and Microsoft SQL Server both hosted on Amazon RDS. The plan is to migrate to AWS Aurora Serverless for all 3 of those database systems.

Additional services we use for our public applications: AWS Lambda, Python, Redis, Memcached, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon ElastiCache

Elasticsearch powers both internal logging and the storage for checks and events. Amazon Elasticsearch Service