Auction.com Accomplishes an Efficient Cloud Modernization Journey Using Migration Evaluator

Auction.com understands the imperative of adapting to rapidly changing real estate market dynamics. The online real estate marketplace requires an environment that can adapt to business-impacting events, such as policy changes or economic crises. To enhance its agility and scalability, Auction.com embarked on a cloud journey to migrate and modernize its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Auction.com sells distressed residential properties. Its business ran on an on-premises infrastructure with thousands of servers across seven data centers, but as the company rapidly grew, it needed the right cloud infrastructure to improve scalability. After a deep analysis of the capabilities needed, the Auction.com leadership chose to migrate to AWS. “We chose AWS for our migration because of scale, speed, security, and innovation,” says Ravi Singh, chief product and technology officer of Auction.com.

To facilitate the migration, Auction.com used Migration Evaluator, a complimentary planning and discovery tool that helps users gain access to insights and accelerate decision-making for migration to AWS. Auction.com used this service to develop a detailed migration assessment, helping it explore different scenarios and select the right AWS services to support the project.

“We were excited to sponsor the investment and support the Auction.com leadership in modernizing its infrastructure,” says Mark Benaquista, managing director of THL, the private equity fund that acquired Auction.com. “This investment resulted in margin optimization, productivity gains, and improvements in the technology stack and prepares Auction.com for the next chapter in its journey.”

Auction.com began migrating to AWS in July 2019, starting with its production environment. Using the reports and migration plans from Migration Evaluator, the company streamlined its total infrastructure to 20 servers to support its core production website and can autoscale to 30–40 servers during high-traffic periods such as auctions. “Using insights from Migration Evaluator, we reduced our technology costs by 34 percent by running on AWS instead of our data center,” says Singh. As a result, Auction.com’s developers can focus their efforts on developing new capabilities and improving application response times.

After moving its production environment, Auction.com began to migrate the remaining 30 percent of its on-premises infrastructure, including internal tooling and supplemental services. It used an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), another complimentary AWS service, to develop a migration strategy—completing the project with maximum efficiency and limited downtime.

In 2020, Auction.com’s employees needed to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company quickly adopted Amazon WorkSpaces, a fully managed desktop virtualization service that facilitates users’ access to internal data, applications, and resources. “Because we had migrated to AWS, we didn’t need expensive infrastructure for virtual work,” says Singh. “We were well equipped to go remote at a moment’s notice.”

Now all in on AWS, Auction.com will continue developing innovative cloud-native solutions to help its customers bid on distressed properties, no matter where they are. In its informed and thoughtful migration to AWS, the company unlocked greater scalability and transformed many of its technology components. “AWS places the customer at the center of the migration experience,” says Singh.