PowerMew Case Study

Background

PowerMew Technology Ltd. is a renowned IT company engaged in building MewMe, an online social networking platform for all real estate stakeholders, including proprietors, buyers, tenants and agents. MewMe efficiently connects all stakeholders and touch points inside one online ecosystem and has been touted as the next "LinkedIn" for the real estate industry.

MewMe’s on-site survey team maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date database of property information, including available properties, sale/purchase agreements, registry documents, transaction records and owner/buyer contracts. MewMe facilitates agents to work collaboratively, thereby eliminating the need to send multiple emails back and forth. Users can access the latest market updates on-the-go and interact with other users/stakeholders regarding the property.

PowerMew’s mobile applications are available on Google, Apple, Baidu, and QQ app stores. Users can find their desired properties via MewMe, an intelligent platform, anytime, anywhere.

Challenges

As the world’s first online social networking platform for the real estate business, we were expecting high volume inbound traffic to the MewMe platform from around the world. While managing the increasing number of public visitors coming to the application via multiple channels such as web, mobile, tablets, and VR technology on our existing hosting architecture, our team were also grappling with the challenge of site/application unavailability, expensive overheads and resource wastage.

Following growth of the business, along with agents and owners uploading property images daily, our traditional storage hardware was becoming more and more expensive. Maintaining data reliability also became an additional and unwanted overhead. In addition, our existing traditional network was not exactly impeccable when it came to handling speed and latency. We needed a better network with faster access speed to serve MewMe’s public visitors from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. to ensure an optimal user experience for our international user base.

After launching MewMe on Google Play and the App Store in May 2016, our number of users grew steadily again. We therefore needed a service to efficiently cope with the increasing user traffic and a load balancing mechanism that would automatically distribute incoming visitor requests and perform intuitive routing.

Why Alibaba Cloud?

We chose Alibaba Cloud because of their growing reputation in performance and innovation, and their results with Alibaba in e-commerce. Being the world’s largest online retailer, Alibaba has an impressive record in handling record-breaking volumes of online traffic. Alibaba’s annual Global Shopping Festival on China's Singles' Day showed to us Alibaba Cloud’s ability to manage IT problems and manage heavy traffic flows – traffic flows of over five hundred million users!

China is also a crucial market for us. In 2015, China spent over $27 billion on U.S properties (depicted in the graph below). The figure keeps rising each year with a growth rate of 600% per year from 2010 to 2015. Given the growing popularity of U.S real estate in China, we needed a solution provider who could understand our needs and offer reliable support for the China market. Alibaba Cloud was at the time, and still is, the number one cloud provider in China.

Results

Powered on the Alibaba Cloud network, MewMe is able to provide users with seamless access to the application from any smart device. It allows public visitors from Hong Kong and Mainland China to access the website faster with reduced latency, and provides a better user experience with improved overall network performance by 150%.

Now in the long run we don’t need to worry about storage capacity as Alibaba Cloud’s Object Storage Service (OSS) provides unlimited, reliable and cheap storage.

Architecture

Products used: Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Server Load Balancer, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Object Storage Service (OSS), ApsaraDB for RDS, CloudMonitor

Alibaba Cloud implemented a public facing Sever Load Balancer that automatically distributes incoming visitor HTTP requests to multiple Elastic Compute Service (ECS) web servers. Server Load Balancer also helps us minimize response time and improve the user experience through its effective request routing capabilities.

The web/app servers that are deployed on ECS instances handle business logic effectively. This process gave us a flexible architecture conducive for a start-up as ECS works as per real-time demands of an application. Additionally, ApsaraDB for RDS has taken over automatic data backups to avoid redundancy and has segregated the data to achieve scalability, and significantly optimizes resource usage. ApsaraDB for RDS was integral in ensuring data security, including resource and access management at the network level.

The MewMe platform stores and backs up static resources and content (e.g. images) on Object Storage Service (OSS). OSS enables us to archive large amounts of data on the cloud and allows customers to review properties online without the need for travel. This helps us to reduce the time needed to close a deal.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) then delivers static content on a global network of edge locations so that visitors from across the world can access the MewMe platform and enjoy a better user experience. This has helped us effectively shorten website response time to milliseconds, ensure smooth image browsing of properties, and handle large volumes of traffic.

We have utilized Cloud Security Service and CloudMonitor to monitor the health of our application and receive updates and alerts accordingly. The Cloud Security Service minimizes threats to sensitive information making MewMe a more reliable platform.

Final Word

We would like to recommend the Alibaba Cloud to others. We truly believe that Alibaba Cloud can help assist more startup companies like us to expand their business, while improving productivity, efficiency and effectiveness.

-Eddie Chan, Founder of PowerMew