AWS re:Invent 2016: Case Study: Spokeo Improved Web Application Response Times with EFS (STG206)

At Spokeo, we are running a fast, big data, and high-traffic website providing people search services. But at our scale, we started to reach limitations to how fast our conventional web stack could do things and concluded that a Ruby on Rails–only solution simply couldn't keep up. In this session, we cover some of the options we had to solve this problem and why we chose Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) as a central part of our solution with metrics and benchmarking. Using EFS, we were able to take response times down from 250 ms to below 70 ms. We look into the architecture of the solution and lessons we learned along the way. In the end, we find that faster response times are just the beginning of the benefits that we see.