Prezzee Drives Business Transformation and Scales 40x Faster by Modernizing Its Digital Gifting Platform on AWS

A global digital gifting platform, Prezzee is on a mission to ignite human connection through digital gifting experiences. Today, millions of registered users rely on Prezzee to buy, send, and redeem digital gift cards from more than 800 retail brands across 6 countries.

Prezzee’s registered user base has grown tenfold in the past two years. However, the company’s monolithic cloud architecture made it difficult to keep pace with this growth. Aran Flanagan, chief technology officer for Prezzee, explains, “We’ve used AWS since we launched the business in 2014, but our initial deployment was almost like a data center in the cloud as opposed to being cloud native.”

Engineers at Prezzee found themselves spending most of their time building and maintaining servers and using manual configurations. Meanwhile, the company’s systems were starting to struggle with peak throughput, speed, and reliability. “To cope with the demand, we were simply scaling up the servers and databases, which was costly and often ineffective,” recalls Flanagan.

In addition, Prezzee wanted to increase its overall system availability. “It’s a digital world, and as more people gift across borders, we need to be reliable and always available when our customers need us,” says Flanagan.

To overcome these challenges and better serve its growing customer base, Prezzee decided to adopt a serverless approach to its AWS technology stack. “We knew that to grow effectively, we needed to reinvent our approach to technology and move to a more modern, leading-edge architecture based on serverless technology,” says Flanagan.

Through talks with the AWS account team, serverless specialists, and other AWS customers, Prezzee transformed the way its teams approach problems. “It was a true collaboration with AWS, from aligning on the vision through to the technology strategy,” Flanagan says. “Throughout our close collaboration with AWS, we were introduced to implementation partners, who brought the expertise plus the additional scale to do the work while still developing our platform’s capabilities. We now engineer for scale, with a curious mindset that embraces experimentation, pushes boundaries, and trials new technology.”

Prezzee runs its entire business on AWS—including websites, eCommerce, billing, inventory management, supply chain integration, customer integrations, customer care, data warehouse and analytics, and security services. As part of its modernization efforts, the company has moved to serverless capabilities running on AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate micro-containers. These are deployed in a combination of regional data hubs and global shared services to provide low latency, high performance, and shared components. Prezzee uses Amazon Aurora for primary transactional databases and Amazon DynamoDB for global serverless structured storage, with Amazon Redshift operating as a data warehouse and machine learning staging area.