Williams’s top priority was securing more reliable storage for the files of Creative Market shop owners. Mission accomplished. “With Amazon EFS, we don’t have to worry about the kind of failure we experienced on Gluster,” says Williams. “Using Amazon EFS, we took a nasty, ugly problem and solved it simply and elegantly.”

The new solution is also simpler to manage. “Since we cut over to Amazon EFS, we have spent exactly zero operational time on file storage, and our Gluster specialist has been able to focus on more valuable work,” says Williams. “With Amazon EFS, our engineers can concentrate on building features and bringing value to the company instead of keeping the infrastructure from toppling over. Their work satisfaction has gone through the roof.”

The process of building those new features is much more streamlined. “Amazon EFS simplifies our development and staging environments,” says Williams. “Previously, we had to launch new clusters and add capacity for every new environment, but Amazon EFS changes size automatically as we add or remove data.”

Williams says the AWS solution has also reduced the company’s storage and operational costs. “By using Amazon EFS, we are saving about 95 percent annually compared to our previous file-storage solution,” says Williams.

Finally, the new solution is also helping Creative Market think bigger—literally. “Now that we are using Amazon EFS, we can start to plan for allowing shop owners to upload much larger files,” says Williams, who expects to be able to increase upload limits from 1 GB to 100 GB within about six months. “We wouldn’t have considered trying to do that before.”

Best of all? Laatz and the rest of the site’s users can rest easy, concentrating on the work they love and leaving the IT backbone of their businesses in the competent hands of Williams and his team. This peace of mind is important because, as Laatz points out, reducing worry and stress was one of the main reasons she opened her shop on Creative Market.

“The nice thing about Creative Market is that you work at your own pace,” says Laatz. “It’s just so much more freedom. I can’t think of anything better than being able to do what you want all day long and not having to worry about anything else.”