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Customer story

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.

Challenge

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

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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.

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Architectural simplicity

Increasing demands caused complexity and operational inefficiencies, including batch and real-time flows, inactivity tracking, and 2 data layers.

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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.

Solution

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:

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Architectural simplification

From two layers to a single consistent, highly available layer

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Always available

100% of the data is hot data and available in real time to both users and internal teams

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Process simplification

Complete removal of processes like the daily snapshot heavy job

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Legacy code removal

Removed huge amount of HBase and Redis legacy code and the work associated with upkeep of that code

Results

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