Your Store Wizards saves over 2,000 hours of infrastructure management
With managed OpenSearch
With NetApp Instaclustr, Your Store Wizards saves 2,000+ hours of infrastructure management time, scales its real-time retail search to millions of weekly queries, and maintains sub-second performance while reducing operational overhead.
Industry
- eCommerce technology
Technologies
- OpenSearch
Challenges
- Scaling real-time search across several hundred eCommerce stores with growing catalog and query volume
- Maintaining fast, sub-second search and autocomplete performance at scale
- Avoiding dedicated engineering resources for infrastructure management
Results
- Delivered consistent, low-latency search across millions of weekly queries
- Eliminated the need for one full-time engineer (2,000+ hours or 260 days annually)
- Reduced operational overhead with a stable, low-touch managed platform
"We’re really focused on giving stores clean, fast search results. That’s a core part of the experience for their customers, so it has to work every time.”
— Brett Bittke, Developer, Your Store Wizards
Scaling search infrastructure
Without adding complexity
Before adopting Instaclustr, Your Store Wizards relied on Elasticsearch as part of a legacy environment that came through an acquisition. The system worked well, but when that platform began to sunset, the team had to make a decision about how to move forward.
At the same time, the scale of their operation was steadily increasing. Search Magic was supporting several hundred active stores, some with catalogs reaching into the hundreds of thousands of products. Weekly query volumes climbed into the millions, driven by both category browsing and autocomplete interactions.
Delivering consistent performance at that scale required more than just raw capacity. It required careful indexing, efficient data pipelines, and a system that could maintain low latency even during peak demand. Customers expected search responses in under a second, with autocomplete often returning results in a fraction of that time.
The team needed a solution that would allow them to scale performance while keeping their engineering focus where it mattered most.
"If we were managing the search infrastructure ourselves, it would take at least one full-time engineer just to keep everything running. That’s time we’d rather spend actually improving the product.”
— Brett Bittke, Developer, Your Store Wizards
Delivering managed search with Instaclustr
Your Store Wizards partnered with Instaclustr to deploy a managed OpenSearch environment, replacing its previous Elasticsearch-based setup. This provided a scalable, open-source search engine capable of handling large data volumes and maintaining fast query performance. Here’s how Instaclustr helped Your Store Wizards’ operations:
Reduced Operational Burden
Instaclustr’s managed service removed the operational burden of running search infrastructure. This includes cluster provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance, allowing the team to operate without allocating engineering resources to infrastructure management.
Seamless Migration
Instaclustr played a key role in the transition itself. Working closely with the Your Store Wizards team, they helped plan and stand up a new OpenSearch environment, ensuring a smooth migration from the legacy platform in less than 12 hours.
Low-Touch Stability
The platform provides a stable foundation for Search Magic without introducing additional operational complexity, requiring minimal day-to-day oversight.
“From our perspective, it’s been a very hands-off experience. We’re not having to spend time thinking about or managing the underlying infrastructure, which is exactly what we were looking for,” said Brett Bittke, Developer, Your Store Wizards.
Driving performance, efficiency, and future growth
With Instaclustr in place, Your Store Wizards has been able to scale its search platform with confidence, achieving outstanding results including:
Confident, High-Performance Scaling
Today, Search Magic supports hundreds of active stores and processes millions of queries each week, all while maintaining strong performance and reliability.
Significant Efficiency Gains
The team eliminated the need for one full-time engineer, or more than 2,000 hours per year, that would have been required to manage OpenSearch in-house.
Focus on Product Innovation
Instead of dedicating engineering time to maintenance, the team can concentrate on refining search relevance, improving performance, and expanding capabilities within the Search Magic platform to deliver more value to customers.
“The biggest benefit is just not having to worry about it. When something’s running well and you don’t have to think about it, that’s a huge win."
— Brett Bittke, Developer, Your Store Wizards
Delivering client-first results for the future
For enterprises looking to unlock scalability and efficiency, NetApp Instaclustr is ready to guide you toward success.
