IMVU's Transformation: Leveraging AWS for Advanced Analytics and Data Streaming

IMVU, the world’s largest avatar-based social network, was facing challenges with its on-premises infrastructure which was limiting its capacity for advanced analytics. The company had been an early adopter of Apache Hadoop and Big Data technologies, but found it difficult to support and upgrade their 90-node Hadoop cluster and in-house built tooling. IMVU’s analysts lacked the tools to rapidly generate a range of business-critical reports on customer in-game behavior at scale. They were working with historical data in batches, which made analytics more complex and created multiple bottlenecks. Late reports resulted in inaccurate assumptions about customer in-game purchases, leading to slower sales and loss of profit. The analytics team also lacked a test environment to efficiently check analytics assumptions. The company sought to modernize their platform’s data architecture by introducing CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and other best practices, to achieve faster analytics iterations, better maintainability, and lower TCO.

IMVU is the world’s largest avatar-based social network, with over 7 million users monthly. Users can customize their avatars, chat with friends, shop, hang out at cool parties, and earn real money by creating virtual products. The company was one of the pioneers and early adopters of Apache Hadoop, taking advantage of Big Data technologies before they became mainstream. IMVU was looking to enhance and re-architect their platform by augmenting it through advanced analytics and data streaming. The company sought to modernize their platform’s data architecture by introducing CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and other best practices, to achieve faster analytics iterations, better maintainability, and lower TCO.