Shaadi.com is the flagship brand for People Interactive. It is one of the largest matchmaking platforms in the world and has been a leader in this space for the last 20 years. It has been built on one simple idea of helping people find a life partner, discover love, and share joy. Their vision is to bring people together through technology. Shaadi.com has helped over 7 million people in finding a life partner and touched the lives of over 50 million people globally.

Shaadi.com conducts profile screening for new users to ensure high quality profiles. They sought assistance from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop an efficient process for onboarding and verifying them. AWS helped Shaadi.com offer faster onboarding and more accurate profile matches, attracting new users, and converting them into paid subscribers to achieve higher market share and revenues.

Going serverless for better user experience

Previously, user profile screening and activation typically took over 40 minutes. However, when backend issues arose it could take longer depending on the time of the day.

To make this process more efficient, Shaadi.com used AWS Serverless Computing to automate the profile screening workflow. AWS Lambda processes the various business rules for validating a profile and AWS Step Functions orchestrates the flow of the events while maintaining workflow states. Decoupling the business rules from a singular application to several AWS Lambda functions allows the team to effectively monitor each execution and quickly identify the root cause of issues using AWS X-Ray. Moreover, the new architecture gives Shaadi.com an option to add, edit, and delete rules quickly without worrying about the impact to the rest of the workflow.

According to Harsh Singh, associate director of product at Shaadi.com, these improvements to the user interface and software infrastructure helped reduce profile activation times by around 20 minutes. “We successfully improved user experience, resulting in significant reduction in tickets related to activation,” adds Singh.

Empowering developers to help drive business growth

Shaadi.com has been an AWS customer since January 2013, having first adopted Amazon Redshift in 2013-2014, before going all-in on AWS in the year 2016. Shaadi.com has also migrated its connections and chat database to Amazon DynamoDB to speed up its text and video chat applications by about 40 percent and accommodate more users.

AWS supported Shaadi.com in their endeavor to migrate away from the legacy architecture to a new age and event-driven serverless architecture. This helped Shaadi.com to build a highly scalable and flexible cloud architecture that supports adaptive and automated workflows with real-time data processing.

Shaadi.com uses AWS Lambda to improve the user onboarding process by deploying code to build, test, deploy, and automatically trigger functions with zero administration. Using AWS Step Functions, the product team can now operate workflow checks in parallel, reducing the time needed to verify new user profiles by more than 50 percent.

With AWS, Shaadi.com development teams can now address customer issues quickly, and has shortened the development cycle from two months to two weeks. Shaadi.com relies on AWS X-Ray to help monitor and debug distributed applications within the workflow aiding in swift identification of any performance issues or errors. AWS X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of the requests throughout the lifecycle by maintaining traces of each request from the time it enters the application workflow to the time it leaves, mapping all the underlying application components such as databases, application programming interfaces (APIs), and more.

Ajay Poddar, vice president of engineering at Shaadi.com, shares that this approach to modernizing applications aligns well with the company’s strategy of creating self-healing, performant, and resilient applications which can scale quickly with changing trends while also taking away a lot of operational overhead in managing and debugging applications.

“New features can be rolled out faster and require fewer attempts than before. Our product and development teams are now more empowered and confident than ever using AWS Managed Services to deliver improvements that increase customer satisfaction and help drive business growth,” explains Poddar.

Gearing up to meet growing market demand

As part of its efforts to capture growing customer segments and improve user experience, Shaadi.com plans to further enhance fraud detection and improve chat support for users.

“Matchmaking is central to Indian values and we expect the market for matrimonial services to keep expanding. Our journey with AWS lays a strong foundation for us to continue scaling up and adapting to meet the needs of new and diverse users in a changing digital landscape,” says Singh.