About Yaga

Yaga is an impact-driven startup that is like a mix between Instagram and eBay, allowing users to browse products in a visual feed or for influencers to create personal online stores. It also addresses one of the main risks of buying from strangers online with its escrow system. This system ensures that money doesn't change hands until both parties confirm the deal went smoothly, providing peace of mind for buyers and sellers alike. To make shopping online more accessible, Yaga offers local payment and delivery methods.

Problem

Entering new markets posed a need for a global cloud infrastructure as Yaga portal is significantly content-heavy. It was crucial to serve content from data centres close to the customer to make the portal feel responsive.

Solution

Yaga was operating only from the AWS Frankfurt region and was looking to expand the service to South Africa, Kenya and India. They needed a solution where it would be easy to set up a new country and keep the cost of infrastructure and IT maintenance low while achieving fast site load times in all target markets. To meet the goal, Yaga evaluated two alternatives:

1. Deploy the application to regions closest to the target market
2. Use AWS CloudFront CDN to serve images from data centres close to target markets but keep all applications centrally deployed in the AWS Frankfurt region.

Based on the measurements, CloudFront comparable page load times as deploying applications to different regions but simplified the solution and kept the hosting costs and management overhead down.

Results

Yaga was able to keep its portal responsive and provide a good user experience while expanding to new markets. By keeping the IT infrastructure central in the AWS Frankfurt region, they avoided increasing the IT operations costs that would have otherwise occurred with multi-region deployment.