InstaShow Case Study

Background

InstaShow Plus is a secure real estate showings platform designed to streamline property tours for landlords, agents, and property managers. It enables prospects to schedule guided or self-guided tours using biometric verification and smart lock technology. This reduces manual coordination and enhances security. Audiences, primarily real estate professionals and prospective tenants, can use the app to automate scheduling, verify visitor identities, and manage property access remotely. The platform also offers features like live camera monitoring, automated notifications, and lead generation tools to simplify and secure the entire showing process.

Objective

The objective was to build a scalable, secure, and highly available cloud infrastructure that supports InstaShow Plus’s real estate showings platform, ensuring seamless property tour scheduling, and realtime communication between prospects and property managers while enhancing operational efficiency and maintaining data security.

Industry / Domain

InstaShow Plus operates within the Property Technology sector, a rapidly growing domain that leverages digital solutions to transform the real estate industry. This includes innovations in property management, virtual tours, smart access control, and automated scheduling. The platform addresses key challenges in real estate showings by integrating biometric verification and smart lock systems, reducing dependency on manual coordination and enhancing security
Insta Show 1

Technology Stack

Group 887

Features

  • Real Estate Showings Three Tier Architecture: The platform follows a secure, multicomponent architecture designed for real estate operations. The presentation layer is hosted on Amazon S3 with static website hosting and integrated with Amazon CloudFront for accelerated global content delivery and caching. DNS resolution is managed through CloudFront and ALB for optimized routing .The application layer includes backend services running on AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2 (for desktop and chat servers), exposed via Amazon API Gateway and an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The chat service runs on 6 EC2 instances, while backend Lambda functions handle business logic for property showings and user management. The data layer is powered by Amazon DocumentDB (MongoDB-compatible), deployed with KMS encryption for secure, compliant data storage. The backend accesses data securely and performs CRUD operations through Lambda integrations.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): All cloud infrastructure is provisioned and managed using AWS CloudFormation, with templates version-controlled in BitBucket. This ensures reproducibility, environment consistency, and traceability of infrastructure changes. Updates are deployed automatically through BitBucket Pipeline.
  • CI/CD Pipeline: A fully automated CI/CD pipeline is implemented using BitBucket Pipelines, which manages source code integration, testing, and deployment for both frontend and backend components. This streamlined process reduces manual errors and ensures faster, more reliable deployments.
  • Security & Compliance: The platform enforces enterprise-grade security using AWS Secrets Manager to store and rotate sensitive credentials, and AWS KMS to encrypt all critical data in DocumentDB. The infrastructure design ensures that sensitive resources remain protected in private subnets or secured service layers. Biometric verification and smart lock integrations further ensure secure, authorized access during property showings.
  • Real-Time Communication & Notifications: InstaShow Plus provides in-app real-time messaging through EC2 hosted chat services and uses Amazon SNS to send push notifications to Android and Mac applications. These notifications are triggered through backend Lambda functions for alerts such as tour confirmations or schedule changes.
  • Monitoring & Logging: The entire application and infrastructure are monitored using Amazon CloudWatch, which collects logs and performance metrics from Lambda functions, EC2 instances, and other services. Custom CloudWatch alarms and SNS-based alerts ensure proactive issue detection and resolution.
  • Scalability & Performance Optimization: The platform is designed for scalability using serverless Lambda functions for backend execution and auto-scaled EC2 instances for chat workloads. CloudFront CDN improves frontend performance by caching and delivering static assets globally. The use of managed services like Lambda, DocumentDB, and S3 allows the system to scale with user demand without manual intervention.

Challenges

  • Ensuring secure access to properties while supporting both guided and self-guided tours.
  • Managing scalable infrastructure to handle fluctuating user demand and real-time chat workloads.
  • Automating deployment and infrastructure updates through CI/CD pipelines to reduce manual errors.
  • Integrating various AWS services such as Lambda, DocumentDB, SNS, and EC2 into a seamless, cohesive platform.

Solution Delivered

  • Conducted a comprehensive assessment of InstaShow Plus’s platform requirements and designed an AWS cloud infrastructure aligned with best practices for security, scalability, and automation.
  • Implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using AWS CloudFormation, enabling consistent, repeatable, and version controlled provisioning of both backend and frontend resources.
  • Established a CI/CD pipeline using BitBucket Pipelines, automating deployment workflows for application code and infrastructure updates to accelerate release cycles.
  • Deployed a hybrid backend architecture combining Amazon EC2 instances for desktop servers and AWS Lambda functions for serverless processing, with API Gateway exposing backend APIs securely.
  • Configured AWS Secrets Manager to securely store and manage sensitive credentials and environment variables accessed by Lambda functions and EC2 instances.
  • Provisioned Amazon DocumentDB (MongoDB-compatible) as a fully managed NoSQL database, encrypted with AWS KMS to ensure data confidentiality and compliance.
  • Set up Application Load Balancer (ALB) to efficiently distribute chat service traffic across EC2 instances, ensuring high availability and low latency for real-time communication.
  • Hosted the frontend static website and media assets on Amazon S3, integrated with Amazon CloudFront for global content delivery, caching, and low-latency access.
  • Enabled real-time push notifications using Amazon SNS for Android and Mac applications, integrated with backend Lambda functions for event-driven alerts.
  • Configured Amazon CloudWatch for centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting on Lambda functions and backend services to proactively detect and respond to issues.
  • Designed the overall environment to be highly available, scalable, and secure, with automated deployments, encrypted data storage, and seamless integration across services to support a smooth and secure property tour experience.

Benefits

  • Automated BitBucket Pipelines enabled continuous integration and deployment, reducing manual intervention and accelerating release cycles for both infrastructure and application code.
  •  Centralized secrets management with AWS Secrets Manager and encryption via AWS KMS ensured secure handling of sensitive data and compliance with industry standards.
  •  The combination of EC2, Lambda, ALB, and CloudFront delivered a highly scalable and available architecture, supporting seamless user access across regions.
  •  Leveraging managed AWS services such as DocumentDB, S3, SNS, and CloudFormation significantly reduced operational overhead and infrastructure management costs.
  •  Amazon CloudWatch and SNS enabled real-time monitoring, centralized logging, and proactive alerting, ensuring high system reliability and faster incident resolution