There’s a lot of noise on the Internet. In our increasingly social and mobile online world, we crave discovery. What are the newest, best products? What do my friends like and what have they bought? With Wanelo, consumers get just that: a visual, social shopping experience that helps them find products and stores through friends and tastemakers.

Wanelo (pronounced “wah-nee-lo” from ‘Want, Need, Love’) is democratizing and transforming the world’s commerce by reorganizing shopping around people -- not advertising or marketing. Founded in 2010 by Deena Varshavskaya, the company has grown to 15 employees (from backgrounds like ModCloth and Etsy) and is seeing tremendous traction, with 6 million registered users and 4 million monthly active users. Moreover, Wanelo users have posted more than 5 million products in the community that are saved up to 8 million times a day -- with 700 million total saves ever from over 200,000 stores.

Wanelo is empowering small stores and businesses to surface their awesome products to a community of active and creative shoppers. With thousands of users, their iOS app is often the #1 app in the App Store’s Lifestyle category (surpassing eBay and Amazon) and has gotten 30,000+ mobile ratings averaging 5 stars on their iOS and Android app.

Scaling a Business in the Cloud

To keep the momentum and user growth strong, Wanelo needed a high-performance cloud provider that could handle increased traffic. Konstantin Gredeskoul, CTO, said Joyent was by far the best option for deploying large-scale Ruby-based applications.

“What I really like about Joyent is the raw CPU and I/O performance that you get out of the cloud, which, in my experience, beats out competition,” Konstantin said.

The ability to burst into additional cores and not add virtual machines also allows Wanelo to effortlessly scale its business -- especially since Wanelo’s traffic more than doubles every day during various hours.

“Being able to handle these spikes [in traffic] without changing latency is really important to us,” Konstantin said.

Meeting Growth Demands Using Chef

This type of business growth requires significant infrastructure growth, but using Chef -- a popular configuration management framework that allows users to easily create and manage a system configuration -- Wanelo was able to be far more efficient. They have grown their infrastructure more than ten times in six months to meet the demands of their exponential user growth; in the next year, they expect to grow their infrastructure by another factor of ten.

Wanelo at #ChefConf2013

If you want to learn more about Wanelo’s experience using Chef with Joyent’s OS-based virtualization, Eric Saxby, Senior Software Engineer at Wanelo, will be giving a presentation at #ChefConf2013 on Thursday April 25 at 2:45pm called “The Kitchen Cloud How To: Automating Joyent SmartMachines with Chef.”

Learn more about Wanelo and see how they use Joyent here.