Challenge
GetNinjas is a service contracting platform that operates in more than 3,000 cities in Brazil and has been expanding in Mexico. With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, GetNinjas’ user base grew exponentially, to the point of increasing average monthly enrollment by up to 60% over 2020[1].
With most of its infrastructure hosted in the United States, GetNinjas has the challenge of delivering fast, reliable service in all regions of Brazil, where:
- according to the World Wide Bandwidth Speed Ranking, the country ranks 111th[2];
- latency rates are well above the national average[3] in areas where a large portion of GetNinjas’ customers are concentrated; and
- the mobile Internet download speed is 35%[4] below the global average, and cell phones are used by 99.2% of Internet users[5].
In addition to performance and scalability obstacles, the GetNinjas team uses data intelligence to ensure application protection. They also perform A / B tests to improve the platform’s performance and its sites’ search engine rankings.
Solution
Azion offers GetNinjas edge-native solutions to enable service delivery with 100% availability—guaranteed by SLA—as well as features that add high value to its strategies and practices, such as:
- observability: GetNinjas’ experts enhanced their observability practices, leveraging Data Streaming insights and updating Edge Firewall programmatically to rapidly mitigate complex threats;
- performance optimization: the logs collected via Data Streaming help GetNinjas’ SRE team to significantly optimize domain performance and cache purging strategy;
- troubleshooting: insights are fundamental for GetNinjas to identify flaws that affect, for example, the indexing of pages by good bots and the recurrence of broken links, which are triggered in proofs of concept (POC) that the team builds;
- cybersecurity: ensuring that complex web threats do not affect applications is one of GetNinjas’ priorities. For this, GetNinjas uses DDoS Protection to mitigate automated threats and secures applications through Web Application Firewall and Network Layer Protection; and
- advanced cache configurations: Azion’s Edge Cache expands GetNinjas’ possibilities for configuring and managing cache, increasing application speed while reducing infrastructure costs substantially.
As the Azion Platform uses open standards, its functionalities can be extended via API to its own or third-party solutions through Azion Marketplace.
The event records received via Data Streaming are processed in the systems used by GetNinjas, where they are crossed with the data obtained via Google Analytics. With this, data analysts have a panoramic view of what happens with GetNinjas’ applications on a daily basis, thus being able to:
- understand what is and is not working;
- monitor an unlimited number of domains;
- assess the correctness of requests; and
- identify bad bots and other malicious activities in real time.
With an extensive range of categories and diverse profiles of customers and professionals using the GetNinjas platform, personalization is essential for customers to have the best experience possible. Using Data Streaming and Edge Functions, GetNinjas’ team performs A / B tests and tracks relevant metrics, such as revenue, conversion and retention.
Results and impacts
The success of GetNinjas using the Azion Platform encompasses several aspects. One of these is the savings generated with the delivery of requests at the edge, fulfilling around 70% of requests to their domains with ultra-low latency, generating significant savings in infrastructure costs.
Azion’s dozens of edge locations in Brazil effortlessly distribute GetNinjas’ request traffic, helping to keep the service always available and reliable. In 2020, for example, when running a campaign on the largest public TV stations in the country, millions of concurrent requests were sustained for several hours, with more than 90% of requests delivered from the edge.
The use of Data Streaming is another highlight, since the data extracted in real time has a notable role in cybersecurity, especially with the identification of bad bots. It has also aided in troubleshooting issues during POCs and increasing performance, delivering a hit-rate increase of up to 80% in domains optimized through log tracking.
Whenever an A / B test is performed, event data collected via Data Streaming helps analysts to improve the user experience by measuring and comparing the effects of each action. At the same time, the insights complement the data collected via Google Analytics, leading GetNinjas to unique discoveries.
In less than a year of taking advantage of Data Streaming, GetNinjas collected more than 3 TB in data that not only increased performance and security, but also contributed to GetNinjas remaining at the top of search results. Anyone looking for a gardener in their city on Google or Bing will find GetNinjas and receive quotes within 24 hours!
“Our relationship with Azion is one of partnership. We are very satisfied with the work that has been done and we consider Azion to be a very important component of our platform. About 70% of the hit rate we have is served on the edge, which is a valuable scale factor for us, since most of our infrastructure is in the United States and the vast majority of our users are in Brazil.”
Marcelo Pattacini Martins, CTO of GetNinjas
About GetNinjas
Selected by Forbes Brasil magazine as one of the most promising companies in Brazil in 2017 and listed in the “100 Startups to Watch” ranking of 2018, GetNinjas is the largest application aimed at hiring services in Latin America.
Founded in the city of São Paulo, GetNinjas emerged in 2011 in order to adapt the idea of hiring a variety of services for the national market, and in three years it was appointed by Google as “one of the most incredible Brazilian startups.”
Currently, the service covers more than 3,000 cities across the country and has more than 1.5 million customers registered on the platform, making GetNinjas the largest promoter of digital inclusion in the provision of services in Brazil.