As a very young and fast growing impact startup, uptraded had only a dev environment in place for the development and deployment of the uptraded clothes swapping app. They approached FullStackS GmbH to find the best solution to handle the growing number of users combined with increased security, continued ease of use and the smallest possible maintenance effort. Within only one week, the complete infrastructure was built in the AWS Cloud for the successful go-live.
Initially, a web version of the clothing exchange platform was available online for
testing and validating hypotheses. One of the findings was that due to the
marketplace nature, the app can only function optimally if enough people register
on the platform. Once the proof of concept was delivered and initial traction was
available, the next major challenge was to reach what we call "critical mass."
According to estimates and rough calculations, this is at around 7,000 active
garments per clothing size and region. To overcome this, the team decided to
develop a native app version. For the transition to the native app version,
uptraded initially had only a non-scalable, simple dev development infrastructure.
The technical solution
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Uptraded approached FullStack to advise them on the best solution for their requirements to enable them to meet their objectives
of rapid customer growth and retention.
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FullStackS are renowned for their vast experience and speed of implementation, having a centre of excellence and plenty of solution architect resources to provide detailed technical information.
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FullStackS used Rancher & Kubernetes for the application management system. After a comprehensive evaluation of other cloud services, Uptraded’s needs could only be met at the time with AWS. Since FullStackS already had experience with setting up Kubernetes Clusters using EC2 Instances and EKS Clusters,
AWS was the perfect fit.
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Uptraded are running eight AWS services in total in the Frankfurt region, predominantly using Aurora (Relational Database Service), AmazonMQ, S3, Redis and EC2 instances (Elastic Cloud) for hardware services.
About the customer, Uptraded
The innovative impact start-up offers a digital platform for clothing exchange that gives users the opportunity to endlessly browse through other people's closets and swap their unused clothes - with a focus on creating an unprecedented shopping experience that outperforms unsustainable alternatives. Uptraded is based on the "Swipe & Match" principle: To swap clothes, I upload garments and swipe through the clothes of others. A mutual like creates a non-binding swap option and opens a chat room where the parties can conveniently arrange their swap. The native app was launched in June 2022 in Austria and Germany, both in the App Store and Google Play Store.
Excellent results
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Since launching the native Uptraded app a few months ago, user growth through AWS has easily gone from zero to up 14,000, with an average of 1600 active users per month.
The app is running smoothly, and the infrastructure has plenty
of capacity for future growth, with great potential for extensive testing and validation of further hypotheses.
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About the AWS partner, FullStackS
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FullStackS offer a wide range of consulting and integration services with a focus on application performance monitoring and management, as well as automation of workloads at the edge, in the core and in the cloud. FullStackS’ consultative approach helps end users minimise operational risks, optimise application performance and gain visibility into their IT infrastructure.
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As an AWS partner, FullStackS can fulfil customers’ business expectations with the relevant competencies, certifications and design skills.
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“Working as an AWS partner means that we can confidently fulfil the needs of our customers. It can be challenging to scale solutions to address customers’ specific requirements, but the collaboration with AWS allows us to
increase business growth with minimal risk. It is great to see such impressive results from Uptraded and we look forward to working with them in the future, always on hand to offer our expertise and advice.”
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- Alexander Appenzeller, FullStackS
Junior Project- & Business Development Manager
“We are delighted with the digital platform that FullStackS
recommended and it’s very
encouraging to see such growth in
our customer base in such a short
space of time, thanks to AWS. Our
goal is to achieve 50,000 users by the end of 2022. FullStackS have been
very helpful and responsive, making sure the app was launched on time
and always on hand to support our AWS infrastructure.”
Thomas Moser
CTO, Uptraded