Real-time personalization for 200 million users
About Wix
Wix is a leading cloud-based web development service provider that allows anyone to get online with a personalized, professional web presence. Developers, web designers, and online professionals can effectively market their apps and services to millions through Wix. For agencies and freelancers, our new platform, Wix Studio, allows them to deliver exceptional client work at scale. Wix offers enterprise grade security, performance, and reliable infrastructure for any type of user and any type of business in the world. They aim to have 50% of anything new created on the web to be through Wix.
Legacy data infrastructure served internal teams and external users poorly
Wix handles web development services for over 234 million total registered users, in 190 different countries and in 22 languages. With over 2 million new users onboarding every month onto the freemium platform, offering a top-notch, personalized customer experience was key to conversion, retention, and upsell.
Wix’s original solution - an HBase system of record and a Redis caching layer - forced the company to make decisions about which data it made available and which it stored for slower retrieval. As data volumes and scale increased, Redis was unable to hold enough data in memory and both internal teams and customers became unhappy with the lack of availability for the data they needed. Challenges included:
Handling high throughput - The platform was unable to keep up with demands to perform self-service computing for:
Over 3500 facts
50K reads per minute
5 million writes per minute at peak
Calculations for over 1.9 billion different keys
High availability
The customer experience went downhill for 234 million registered users plus 2 million new users each month. 1600 R&D employees working on new services, analysis, and insights couldn’t access necessary data.
Architectural simplicity
Increasing demands caused complexity and operational inefficiencies, including batch and real-time flows, inactivity tracking, and 2 data layers.
Data accessibility
Needed to make data available for its 70 internal teams to use for research, development, business analysis, and gaining insights into real time user behavior.
Simple, clean architecture and 100% availability for all data
When Wix replaced Redis and HBase with Aerospike, they immediately gained huge benefits while simplifying their data architecture and operational burden. They now can provide always-on access to all user data, giving internal teams the ability to run intelligence into dynamic product-wide decisions, identify entire populations of users, and run machine learning for specific users. The customers, channels, and partners gain personalized product experience and customer care, improving conversion, retention, and upsell opportunities. The solution includes:
Architectural simplification
From two layers to a single consistent, highly available layer
Always available
100% of the data is hot data and available in real time to both users and internal teams
Process simplification
Complete removal of processes like the daily snapshot heavy job
Legacy code removal
Removed huge amount of HBase and Redis legacy code and the work associated with upkeep of that code
Higher performance, less complexity, lower costs
With Aerospike, Wix has been able to improve performance, scalability, and architectural complexity of their platform while also setting themselves up for future growth.
100% data availability in real time
From partial data availability to full availability in real time
6x faster response times
Response times reduced from 18 ms to 3 ms or less
Slash data layers by 50%
Architectural complexity reduced from 2 data layers to 1 data layer
45% lower annual cost
All-around costs reduced by 45% per year
Testimonials
Data availability in real time [had a] major impact on the business. Our response times [with Aerospike] dropped from 18 milliseconds total to 2 to 3 milliseconds. Plus, we experienced cost savings of over 45% just by moving to Aerospike. Thus we have all the data available for less than what we paid before.
Tal Gabay
WixEngineering ManagerGet started with Aerospike
For high-performance, scalable data management and ultra-low latency, ideal for handling massive datasets and real-time applications.
