Collectr and Dedicatted increase reliability for millions by using AWS

Collectr’s application helps collectors track, value, and manage trading cards and other collectibles in near real time (NRT). One of Canada’s fastest-growing consumer companies, Collectr tracks more than 800 million products and handles over 13 million active sessions daily. But the growing number of daily active users revealed critical infrastructure limitations. Activity spikes during major card releases caused performance degradation and outages. The company experienced up to 10 major issues per week, and its application availability dropped below 80 percent during peak periods.

As the application grew, it became a prime target for scrapers that harvest collectibles’ pricing data. This traffic stacked on top of activity spikes from actual users, degrading the user experience and inflating compute costs. At peak, malicious traffic accounted for an estimated 28 percent of total application requests. In addition, the company had no observability into application health and no capacity to manage infrastructure operations while deploying new features or applications. Every issue pulled engineers off the road map. “Traffic kept climbing, issues were getting more frequent and lasting longer, and our users had zero tolerance for downtime,” says Adam Hijleh, CEO at Collectr. “We had almost no room to test changes safely before pushing them. We needed someone who could take the infrastructure off our plate, fast.”

For its infrastructure transformation, Collectr chose to work with Dedicatted, a Toronto-based AWS Managed Service Provider. Dedicatted took over responsibility for Collectr’s AWS infrastructure and operations through the 24/7 Platform Support Service available in AWS Marketplace. In the short term, that means active technical crisis management and major issue response. In the long term, it involves continuous monitoring, issue management, infrastructure operations, and ongoing optimization so that Collectr’s engineers can focus on product development. The team implemented infrastructure as code, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, and security best practices, using Amazon CloudWatch to observe and optimize workloads at scale. To gain NRT visibility into platform health, the team built Collectr’s observability capability from scratch, including dashboards, alarms, anomaly detection, and issue response workflows.

The application runs on AWS Lambda, which provides serverless compute. And Amazon API Gateway makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at scale. Dedicatted tuned concurrency and service configurations so that the compute scales automatically with demand spikes. The application stores data in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is optimized for total cost of ownership. Dedicatted tuned the existing database and rearchitected the data layer, designing new data schemas, and introducing database sharding. It also added Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database, to create a hybrid design that removed a key scaling bottleneck and unblocked growth.

After the application stabilized, the team turned to abuse detection. During the investigation phase, Dedicatted analyzed more than 50 million user requests, surfacing the scraping patterns and bot signatures behind the abuse. The partner encoded those findings into a deterministic, multilayered abuse-detection system.

In addition, the team built an AI-enhanced pattern-detection process on Amazon Bedrock, a service for building generative AI applications and agents. When the alerting system flags a traffic spike, the pipeline analyzes a slice of the request logs, identifies the emerging pattern, and proposes new detection rules. Then, Dedicatted’s engineers review, approve, and deploy those changes. A logging pipeline captures and enriches request-level telemetry across Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon CloudFront—a content delivery network. Evaluating traffic in NRT, a detection engine enforces those rules automatically at the edge through Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF to control bot traffic and block common attack patterns. “With abuse detection, the challenge is never finished,” says George Levytskyy, senior solutions architect at Dedicatted. “Scrapers adapt, so we continuously monitor and roll out new mitigations as threats emerge.”

Over 3 months, Collectr had zero priority 1 or 2 issues, experiencing no major outages or events with a major business impact. The application now absorbs release-day spikes, including high-risk traffic events, of seven times the normal load without degradation. This helped the company maintain virtually zero downtime across every major card release in the last 6 months, providing a stable, reliable experience for collectors. “Dedicatted’s abuse-detection system dynamically blocks about 400,000 malicious requests per week before they consume compute, reducing AWS Lambda costs,” says Hijleh.

By handling infrastructure operations, Dedicatted frees Collectr’s engineers to ship features instead of troubleshooting issues—a direct competitive advantage in a fast-moving market. The number of the application’s daily active users has grown by roughly 15 times in 1 year since Collectr began working with the partner. “Before Dedicatted, every spike felt like an emergency,” says Muhammad Rashid, chief operating officer at Collectr. “Now, releases that used to take us down just work,” says Hijleh. “We stopped thinking about infrastructure and got back to building the product. Dedicatted feels more like an extension of our team, and knowing they’re continuously monitoring our application on AWS has changed how we operate.”

AWS Premier Tier Services Partner Dedicatted specializes in managed cloud operations and platform engineering.