“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
Challenge
GetNinjas is a digital services marketplace platform operating in more than 3,000 cities across Brazil, and it has been expanding its operations into Mexico.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for digital services increased rapidly. In 2020, traffic grew significantly, raising the average number of new monthly registrations by up to 60%.
At the same time, a large portion of the company’s infrastructure was located in the United States. This created important challenges in ensuring low latency and high availability for users distributed across Brazil.
This scenario becomes even more complex considering that:
- Brazil ranks relatively low in global broadband speed rankings;
- some regions experience latency levels significantly higher than the national average;
- 99.2% of users access the internet through smartphones, while the country’s average mobile internet speed is approximately 35% below the global average.
In addition to performance and scalability challenges, GetNinjas also needed to strengthen its capabilities in data analysis, application security, and search engine optimization.
Solution
Azion provides GetNinjas with capabilities from the Azion Platform, enabling service delivery with 100% availability — guaranteed by SLA —, along with resources that enhance its operational and technology strategies, including:
- Observability: using Firewall and Data Stream, GetNinjas improves observability practices through programmable security controls and real-time event insights, allowing complex threats to be mitigated quickly;
- Performance optimization: logs collected through Data Stream help the GetNinjas SRE team significantly improve domain performance and optimize cache purge strategies;
- Troubleshooting: real-time insights allow engineers to identify issues affecting page indexing by search engines or recurring broken links, supporting the development of internal proof-of-concept solutions;
- Cybersecurity: protecting applications from sophisticated web threats is a priority for GetNinjas. The team uses automated mitigation mechanisms such as DDoS Protection, while securing applications through Firewall and Network Shield;
- Advanced cache configuration: Azion Cache expands GetNinjas’ capabilities for configuring and managing caching strategies, increasing application speed while significantly reducing infrastructure costs.
Because the Azion Platform uses open standards, its capabilities can be extended through APIs to internal or third-party solutions via the Azion Marketplace.
Event logs collected via Data Stream are processed in the systems used by GetNinjas and combined with data from Google Analytics. This provides analysts with a comprehensive view of application activity, enabling them to:
- understand what is and isn’t working;
- monitor an unlimited number of domains;
- validate request behavior;
- identify malicious bots and suspicious activity in real time.
With a wide range of service categories and diverse user profiles across the platform, personalization is critical to delivering the best possible experience. Using Data Stream and Functions, the GetNinjas team runs A/B tests and monitors key metrics such as revenue, conversion, and retention.
Results and impacts
The success of GetNinjas using the Azion Platform spans several areas. One of the most significant outcomes is the infrastructure cost savings generated by request delivery through Azion’s distributed infrastructure, which handles approximately 70% of the platform’s hit rate with ultra-low latency.
Azion’s network infrastructure in Brazil absorbs traffic peaks from GetNinjas, helping maintain consistent service availability and reliability. In 2020, for example, during a campaign broadcast on the country’s largest national television networks, millions of concurrent requests were sustained for hours, with more than 90% of requests delivered by Azion’s infrastructure.
The use of Data Stream also played a key role. Real-time event data improved cybersecurity visibility, particularly for identifying malicious bots, while also supporting troubleshooting during internal proof-of-concept projects.
Through log analysis and optimization strategies, GetNinjas increased the hit rate of optimized domains by up to 80%.
Whenever A/B tests are executed, event data collected via Data Stream helps analysts measure and compare the impact of each change. These insights complement data collected through Google Analytics, enabling deeper analysis and new optimization opportunities.
In less than one year of using Data Stream, GetNinjas collected more than 3 TB of operational data, improving performance, strengthening security, and helping the platform maintain strong visibility in search engine results. Anyone searching for a gardener in their city on Google or Bing will likely find GetNinjas and receive service quotes within 24 hours.
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 named 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.
