Fastly > Case Studies > RealtyNinja's Scalable Image Serving Architecture with Fastly

RealtyNinja's Scalable Image Serving Architecture with Fastly

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Computer Vision Software
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices

Applicable Industries

National Security & Defense
Telecommunications

Use Cases

Clinical Image Analysis
Tamper Detection

About The Customer

RealtyNinja is a real estate website builder that empowers real estate agents to create beautiful, customizable websites that enhance marketing and capture leads. The company started as a bootstrap startup and has grown to automatically update over 1,000 sites with data from numerous real estate boards in Canada. RealtyNinja's customers are real estate agents who require fast, responsive, and up-to-date websites to engage their end users - home buyers. These agents rely on RealtyNinja to provide a seamless experience that's accessible wherever their end users want it, with top-quality images and secure websites.

The Challenge

RealtyNinja, a real estate website builder, was facing challenges in meeting the growing expectations of its customers. As the business expanded, customers demanded faster websites that could keep their end users engaged. With the availability of MLS information, home buyers were not willing to wait for a page to load and often did not give slow sites a second chance. RealtyNinja also had to ensure that the information on its websites was always up-to-date. Their agreements with real estate boards required that out-of-date information should not last for more than 24 hours on any of its websites. Failure to comply could result in fines or lawsuits. Additionally, RealtyNinja had to manage the transformation of 80+ million images per month in real-time, catering to an array of screen sizes and display types.

The Solution

RealtyNinja turned to Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) technology, to improve the speed and performance of their websites. Fastly was chosen for its ease of use with RealtyNinja's existing tech stack, including AWS. Fastly's Instant Purge capabilities ensured that websites always served fresh content, protecting RealtyNinja from the risk of damaging their reputation and losing potential clients due to outdated information. RealtyNinja also used surrogate key purging to tag content, making purging faster and more efficient. Fastly's Image Optimization was added to RealtyNinja's toolkit to manage the transformation of 80+ million images per month in real-time. This streamlined the process by moving image transformation to the edge cloud network, reducing latency and simplifying the work for the RealtyNinja dev team. Lastly, RealtyNinja used Fastly TLS to automate security at scale, ensuring both new and legacy websites were secure and protected from Google's page rank downgrades for non-HTTPS websites.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Fastly's CDN technology significantly improved the speed and performance of RealtyNinja's websites, meeting the growing expectations of their customers. Fastly's Instant Purge capabilities and surrogate key purging ensured that RealtyNinja's websites always served fresh and accurate content, protecting the company's reputation and preventing potential client loss. The addition of Fastly's Image Optimization to RealtyNinja's toolkit streamlined the process of transforming 80+ million images per month in real-time, reducing latency and simplifying the work for the dev team. This resulted in a great user experience with top-quality images for homeowners and buyers. Lastly, the use of Fastly TLS automated security at scale, ensuring that RealtyNinja's websites were secure and protected from Google's page rank downgrades for non-HTTPS websites. This invisible technology provided users with a sense of trust and security.

Quantitative Benefit

RealtyNinja's image serving architecture scaled 10x with Fastly
Fastly optimized 80+ million images per month for RealtyNinja
Fastly's Instant Purge capabilities ensured that out-of-date information did not last for more than 24 hours on RealtyNinja's websites