Realtor.com can easily scale its environment to support the growth of its Turbo Listings feature. “We are able to take advantage of the massive scale of the AWS Cloud to grow new features and expand our company as a whole,” Lewis says. “Our new Turbo Listings feature has thousands of campaigns sold, and we’re processing tens of millions of ad impressions a day. We know we can scale far higher than that as the product grows.” The company will also be able to continue its rapid website growth once it completes the migration to AWS. “Using AWS, we know we will have the capacity to support many new site visitors.”

The company’s customers can now launch campaigns and make changes to their campaigns in real time. Lewis adds, “With Amazon Kinesis and the other AWS analytics services, we can create real-time applications easily and quickly.”

Once its website migration is finished, the company will have the elasticity to automatically manage different traffic patterns. “We will be able to predict how much capacity we need without knowing any other details about a specific system, because of the automatic dynamic scalability in AWS,” says Lewis. “We can provision and use exactly the amount of compute we want and allow that to automatically shift to meet our needs. It will give us more flexibility and help us save money.”

Realtor.com also reduced development costs. “Developing Turbo Listings in our own data center would have been much more costly, because we would have to build out the underlying platform,” says Lewis. “Using Amazon Kinesis and the other AWS services, we can now build sophisticated real-time applications that wouldn’t be economically feasible on premises. That means we can build things we wouldn’t have been able to build before.”

Additionally, the company benefits from the ease of use of AWS services. “Amazon Kinesis Firehose worked without us having to do anything,” Lewis says. “There’s no administration or configuration required—it simply pipes in all the ad impression data we need to capture, which allows us to focus on building business applications and quickly creating data insights.”

Realtor.com is also better able to support its DevOps approach. “AWS has really helped us accelerate our move to a DevOps model,” says Lewis. “The AWS services are easier to understand than our data center stack was, and that puts our application developers on more common ground with our operations team. They’re not all looking through different lenses. They’re looking through a single lens—AWS.”