Runkeeper Migrates To AWS With Near Zero Downtime

The Challenge

As the growth of its customer base continued to accelerate, the Runkeeper senior management team realized user demand on the company’s hosted data center infrastructure would soon exceed the available compute resources. Because the data center could not add any additional storage, if the database reached the limit, the Runkeeper application would simply shut down.

Runkeeper was also concerned about distributed denial-of-service attacks on other clients in the data center. Even though Runkeeper was not the target, these attacks impacted customer connectivity.

Moving the data center to a public cloud platform was the logical choice for increased scalability and improved performance. But careful planning and execution would also be required to successfully migrate the company’s SQL database. Runkeeper could not afford any downtime.

“By relying on Mission to manage and monitor our AWS cloud platform, we no longer have to spend time on system maintenance and stability. That makes it a lot easier for our internal team to focus on building and improving features so we can deliver better apps to our customers.”

Steve Huff
Site Reliability Engineer

The Solution

Having already utilized Amazon Web Services for smaller environments, Runkeeper trusted the public cloud platform to provide the compute performance, flexibility and scalability the company required. When approaching Amazon about building a platform for the database and six production applications, Amazon strongly recommended that Runkeeper collaborate with a consulting partner and pointed to Mission as the perfect choice.

Mission worked closely with Runkeeper and its database management company (Second Quadrant) to plan a streaming replication process to migrate the database and the applications over to AWS. Once the switch was flipped, Runkeeper slowly increased the percentage of traffic hitting the applications and the database in the previous data center over to AWS. This approach kept application downtime for the 40 million customers to less than one hour.

Results

For Runkeeper, the partnership with Mission and AWS has also generated several additional key benefits:

• Improved overall experiences for customers as they interact with the Runkeeper applications.
• On-going Managed DevOps that keeps applications and the database running smoothly while internal resources focus on developing feature improvements.
• Fast triage and resolution that solve most performance issues and fully inform the internal IT team on any issues that require escalation with Mission Cloud One.
• No more need to worry about denial-of-service attacks.