How UNiDAYS achieved AWS Region expansion in 3 weeks

UNiDAYS is a fast, free digital platform that provides exclusive student offers and benefits to over 29 million verified members worldwide. With a rapidly growing user base and an increasing number of global partnerships, UNiDAYS recognized the need to enhance its platform’s performance to deliver a seamless consumer experience in geographic regions far from its original base of operations.

In this post, we share how UNiDAYS achieved AWS Region expansion in just 3 weeks using AWS services.

Business challenges

In response to growth opportunities, UNiDAYS faced a pressing business requirement: deliver low-latency responses and provide high availability for users across diverse geographic regions. At the same time, the platform needed to guarantee global data consistency while adhering to tight deadlines—all within just a few weeks. However, the existing monolithic application, although built on HAQM Web Services (AWS), wasn’t optimized for active-active multi-Region deployments.

The challenge was further complicated by the need to extend functionality from this legacy system, which used the AWS global network for improved user experience but fell short of meeting new business requirements. Re-architecting the entire platform to support multi-Region deployments within the given timeframe wasn’t feasible.

Solution overview

UNiDAYS opted to create complementary services tailored to these new requirements, using AWS services for a multi-Region, active-active architecture. The key services used included:

• HAQM CloudFront and HAQM Route 53 – For global delivery and lowest-latency responses
• HAQM DynamoDB – To provide consistent, highly available data across Regions
• HAQM Elastic Container Service (HAQM ECS) – For scalable, deployable containerized resources
• HAQM EventBridge – To enable asynchronous integration with existing systems through event-driven patterns

This approach allowed UNiDAYS to meet its latency, availability, and consistency goals while seamlessly integrating with existing infrastructure. The following diagram is the architecture for the solution.

Global delivery and resiliency

To provide the lowest latency and multi-Region resiliency, CloudFront was used with latency-based routing configured in Route 53. This routing directs requests to the Regional Application Load Balancers with the lowest latency, automatically providing resiliency in the event of Regional issues. Security was a key consideration. AWS WAF integration with CloudFront provided application-layer protection at the edge. Additional security measures included:

• Custom HTTP headers on origin requests, enforced using Application Load Balancer listener rule conditions
• Prefix lists to restrict access to Application Load Balancers, making sure that traffic originated from the intended CloudFront distributions

Rapid Regional deployment

The core infrastructure is deployed through Terraform, and applications are deployed using custom tooling that wraps AWS CloudFormation. This hybrid approach enabled rapid delivery by using existing patterns without disrupting established workflows. Resources were organized into tiers: platform, global, and Regional. Platform and global resources were deployed one time, and Regional resources were rolled out to each activated Region, streamlining expansion efforts.

One technical challenge involved CloudFormation exports, which are Regional by design. To address this, we implemented a custom CloudFormation macro to enable cross-Region access to exported values, providing consistency across deployments.

HAQM ECS enabled progressive application deployments within each Region, allowing teams to focus on scaling applications rather than managing infrastructure. For cost-efficiency, we used Spot Instances. During testing, container start-up latency was observed due to cross-Region image downloads from HAQM Elastic Container Registry (HAQM ECR). This issue was resolved by enabling private image replication in HAQM ECR so that container images were available locally in each Region. This solution significantly reduced start-up times, improving application responsiveness during deployments and scaling events.

Data consistency and performance

DynamoDB global tables were instrumental in providing eventual data consistency and Regional replication. With DynamoDB handling these aspects, we could focus on application logic.

The result was a substantial reduction in latency at key locations. For example, client-experienced latency in one Region dropped from approximately 200 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds upon deployment, as shown in the following screenshot.

Key technical hurdles

We addressed the following technical obstacles while developing the solution:

• Cross-Region CloudFormation exports – CloudFormation exports are Regional by design. We addressed this by creating a custom CloudFormation macro to read exports across Regions.
• Container start-up latency – Latency caused by cross-Region image downloads was mitigated by implementing HAQM ECR private image replication. This meant that container images were readily available in each Region, reducing deployment times and improving overall performance.
• Security assurance – By using CloudFront, AWS WAF, and Application Load Balancer security features, we made sure that traffic and data remained secure.

Why AWS?

UNiDAYS chose AWS due to its comprehensive global infrastructure and robust service offerings, which allowed the platform to:

• Seamlessly expand compute operations to Regions closer to its user base
• Take advantage of a full stack of services for reliable, secure, and low-latency content delivery
• Meet tight delivery deadlines without compromising on performance or security
• Maintain flexibility where required, with the ability to use more managed services, which allowed a focus on our applications

Conclusion

By adopting a multi-Region, active-active architecture on AWS, UNiDAYS successfully met its business goals within only 3 weeks, rapidly expanding to new Regions while promoting platform resiliency. The solution improved latency by 75% in new Regions (from 200 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds), provided Regional data availability through DynamoDB global tables, and maintained 100% service uptime during resiliency tests, even in cases of Regional connectivity loss. Additionally, deployment velocity increased by over 40%, allowing faster feature releases and improved agility. This architecture not only provides a scalable and resilient platform for current operations but also establishes a strong foundation for future global expansion.

Learn more

Is your organization looking to expand into new Regions while maintaining performance and reliability?

• Contact AWS experts to explore tailored solutions for your multi-Region strategy.
• Use AWS Global Infrastructure to optimize your expansion.
• Share your challenges and successes in the comments—we’d love to hear your insights!

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