Cloud-Native Rental Architecture Helped Renticy Scale Merchant Onboarding and Cut Media Storage Costs

Renticy, a fast-growing e-commerce solutions provider, partnered with Cygnet.One to design a modern, rental-first management platform to support online retailers offering product rentals. The new system, built on AWS, centralized inventory and rental lifecycle management while simplifying integrations with leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce.

With scalable AWS storage, automated backups, and a modular microservices architecture, Renticy helped merchants enhance their digital storefronts while reducing infrastructure costs and operational overhead.

As e-commerce continues to evolve, a growing number of online retailers are shifting toward rental models to attract a broader customer base and create recurring revenue streams. Renticy recognized this shift early and envisioned a platform where merchants could easily offer rental options—without replacing their existing e-commerce solutions.

Many of Renticy’s retail partners operate on platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, which offer excellent sales features but limited support for rental-based scheduling, inventory tracking, and duration-based pricing.

Manual workarounds had become increasingly difficult to manage, especially as merchants began offering a wider array of rental durations, from hourly to monthly. In addition, there was a growing need to store and retrieve large volumes of product media, contracts, and customer records securely and efficiently.

To build a scalable, flexible foundation that could handle both the complexity of rentals and the demands of e-commerce performance, Renticy turned to Cygnet.One to architect a future-ready, cloud-native system using AWS.

This new architecture enabled retailers to launch rental features in minutes, consolidate operational views of inventory and rental timelines, and store data securely—all while keeping cost predictability and high performance at the core.

Renticy had already established itself as a trusted partner to small and mid-sized e-commerce retailers. With the rental economy gaining traction, the company aimed to become the go-to platform for rental-ready online commerce. However, several architectural and operational challenges limited their ability to scale:

• No Native Rental Workflows – Existing platforms offer limited or no support for rentals, requiring manual tracking of return dates, durations, and inventory availability.
• Data Fragmentation – Rental records, user transactions, contracts, and media files were stored across disparate systems, making retrieval inefficient and auditing difficult.
• Integration Limitations – Without modular, scalable APIs, integrating rental workflows into popular e-commerce systems risked downtime and data inconsistencies.
• High Media Storage Costs – Storing large volumes of images, rental agreements, and usage logs on traditional infrastructure led to growing operational expenses.
• Manual Backups and Security Risks – Data protection routines lacked automation, and activity logs were difficult to audit, making compliance slower and more effort-intensive.

Renticy’s leadership identified a clear opportunity: invest in a platform that not only streamlined operations for merchants but also set the stage for long-term scalability and data-driven growth.

Cygnet.One worked closely with Renticy’s product and engineering teams to design a purpose-built rental management system on AWS. The architecture embraced microservices, cloud-native databases, and secure storage practices to meet Renticy’s core goals of performance, flexibility, and scale.

A lightweight React.js front-end and Node.js backend enabled rapid development and merchant-facing configurability. Each core function—such as scheduling, inventory updates, or customer communication—was built as a discrete microservice, allowing for fault isolation, performance tuning, and independent scaling.

For structured data, Amazon RDS with PostgreSQL was deployed using multi-AZ configurations, ensuring continuous availability and daily automated backups.

Read replicas allowed reporting and analytics workloads to run without affecting primary transaction performance. Write operations were tightly controlled through role-based service access, minimizing data conflicts and improving integrity.

To address high-volume file storage, Amazon S3 was used for images, contracts, and transaction logs. Lifecycle policies intelligently transitioned objects between S3 Standard, Infrequent Access, and Glacier tiers based on access frequency and retention needs—leading to a 40% drop in media storage costs without sacrificing durability.

For workloads needing shared access—such as service coordination logs and templates—Amazon EFS provided consistent, low-latency file sharing.

Data protection was strengthened using AWS Backup to automate and unify backup strategies across EFS, RDS, and S3. Immutable audit trails were captured via CloudTrail and stored securely in S3 with defined retention rules, ensuring long-term traceability and compliance readiness.

Observability was enhanced through integration with AWS-native logging and metrics services, giving Renticy real-time visibility into system performance, API activity, and customer usage.

With the rental management system now live and serving a growing base of online merchants, Renticy has expanded its platform’s value while staying lean on infrastructure. By automating core processes and improving backend scalability, merchants can offer new rental products with confidence, speed, and minimal overhead.

• Reduced Storage Overhead – S3 intelligent tiering cut media-related infrastructure costs by 40% while improving media durability and access.
• Faster Time to Market – New merchants enabled rental functionality in minutes, without needing to replace or redesign their storefronts.
• High System Availability – With Multi-AZ RDS and EFS, the platform maintained 99.99% uptime across critical services.
• Stronger Compliance Posture – Automated backups, immutable logs, and encryption aligned with internal and merchant security policies.
• Operational Efficiency – Centralized control and automated scheduling improved accuracy, reduced manual tasks, and supported business growth.
• Future-Ready Architecture – A modular, microservices-based design positions Renticy to continue adding features, integrations, and merchant services without disrupting core workflows.

Renticy’s success reflects the power of tailored, AWS-powered modernization focused on real business needs—delivering agility, security, and value across the e-commerce rental landscape.