Alerabat is one of the fastest-growing Polish e-commerce platforms,
offering users cashback and discount codes at over 3,000 stores. To handle the growing traffic and optimize cloud spending, the company partnered with Hosters.
The result of this collaboration is a modern, automated AWS infrastructure that combines high performance with cost-effectiveness.
About the Client
Alerabat.com is a platform that helps users save money while shopping online. Users can take advantage of current discounts and cashback offers through a dedicated browser plugin and mobile app. The solution automatically searches for and applies available discounts, which requires a reliable technological backend capable of handling thousands of queries in real time.
Challenge
The main design challenge was to organize the distributed infrastructure and eliminate overprovisioning (resource redundancy), which was generating unjustified costs. The client needed:
- To divide environments into isolated accounts (PROD, DEV, TOOLS) to increase security and streamline management.
- Implementation of full automation of machine image building and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) management.
- A thorough TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis and the implementation of cost-saving strategies without compromising performance.
Solution
The Hostersi team designed and implemented an architecture based on AWS best practices, utilizing advanced automation tools:
- Environment segmentation and communication: The infrastructure was divided into three separate AWS accounts: PROD (production), DEV (development), and TOOLS (tools). VPC Peering was used for secure communication between them.
- Containerization and orchestration: All computing services were based on Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service), which enabled efficient container management and easy application scaling.
- Automation (IaC & DevOps):
- Terraform was used to manage the entire infrastructure.
- Machine images running in Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) are built automatically using Packer and Ansible.
- A dedicated LXD container was set up for centralized management of infrastructure operations.
- Security: Layered protection was ensured through the integration of Cloudflare WAF with native AWS WAF. Access to the AWS console was strictly regulated using IAM roles, and sensitive data is protected by the KMS service.
- Data and Caching Layer: Amazon RDS was used for databases, and Amazon ElastiCache was used to accelerate data operations.
Technology Stack
The following technologies and services were used in the project:
- Compute: ECS, EC2, Lambda
- Infrastructure as Code & DevOps: Terraform, Packer, Ansible, LXD
- Database & Storage: RDS, ElastiCache, S3
- Networking & Content Delivery: CloudFront, VPC Peering, ACM
- Security: Cloudflare WAF, AWS WAF, IAM, KMS
- Management & Serverless: CloudWatch, SQS, EventBridge
Results and Business Value
Thanks to close collaboration with Alerabat, we achieved measurable business benefits:
- Cost Optimization: Based on metrics from Amazon CloudWatch (CPU, RAM, I/O), instance types and sizes were adjusted to actual demand, significantly reducing expenses.
- Strategic savings: Savings Plans were implemented for ECS services, and Reserved Instances were purchased for EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache. This enabled long-term infrastructure cost reductions while maintaining full resource availability.
- Scalability: Thanks to Auto Scaling for ECS, the platform automatically adjusts computing resources to current user traffic levels.
- Financial transparency: The use of the AWS Pricing Calculator enabled precise modeling of future costs and informed planning for platform development.
Summary
The result of our collaboration is a well-organized, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure capable of automatically scaling based on current workloads. By using the AWS Pricing Calculator, our client can accurately model future costs, which significantly enhances the platform’s planning and development capabilities.
