Domain Group has become a more agile and responsive business since migrating to AWS. The real estate services organization is deploying new applications, websites, and services more quickly, delivering faster server response times, scaling its infrastructure to support demand peaks and troughs, improving application and website availability, and provisioning new compute

“The value of infrastructure as a service and Auto Scaling has resulted in a massive reduction in our time to market as we skip the entire CAPEX approval process. We only use what we need right now and scale on demand–instead of buying for peak load plus expected growth,” says Mark Cohen, chief technology officer at Domain Group.

The business can now configure a new Windows instance in 10 minutes and spin up a copy of its production environment in staging to test how Domain Group applications meet user demands. Domain Group has used these capabilities to add a new school-boundary

“We had an idea to add a new schools-catchment-area feature and had it running by the following morning with AWS. Now it’s one of the major features of our sites,” says McManus. User experience has also improved with the Domain Group AWS infrastructure now responding 50 percent faster on the server side to user requests for web pages.

Domain Group has eliminated the problem of underused hardware by automatically scaling its infrastructure up during peak periods and during marketing campaigns, and scaling down during less active periods such as winter. The scalable and elastic capabilities of the AWS platform allowed Domain Group to take this approach in a cost-efficient manner.

The business is now able to dedicate more staff to building features for their users since they no longer need to perform basic tasks like changing disks and upgrading memory. Application availability has risen to 99.95 percent and prompted an 83 percent decrease in after-hours service calls to the technology team.

McManus is excited about how AWS can help Domain Group further improve the speed and ease of software development. “The platform gives us the opportunity to further innovate in the way we deliver software,” he says.