Case Studies

Write About Case Study

Improving Website Performance
The Challenge

Site performance

Write About quickly scaled their app tier and increased their Aurora DB size to handle traffic increase. Though the elasticity of the AWS cloud allowed Write About to do this quickly, Write About approached BoltOps to help improve the site performance so their users would have a smooth experience in a more efficient way.

  • The goal was to keep the application running smoothly regardless of seasonal school year traffic when teachers and students are writing more.
  • Be able to spin down servers and handle the same traffic level more cost-effectively.
  • Recommend a long-term plan with AWS best practices to meet future needs.
The Solution

Systematically improving performance

Write About runs on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. BoltOps was able to use it’s open source tool jack to quickly understand the infrastructure. BoltOps was then able to quickly review the architecture and dive immediately into the performance analysis::

  • CloudWatch network request throughput and CPU load was reviewed.
  • Application stack traces were analyzed.
  • RDS Aurora monitoring metrics and slow query logs were investigated.

BoltOps was able to identify the causes of the performance issues quickly. BoltOps systematically then deployed changes, review response time improvements, and repeated the process until the site’s performance was at an acceptable level. The learnings were reviewed, and a long-term plan was provided to help Write About handle future traffic needs.

Background

Classroom writing community and publishing platform built by teachers.

Write About provides a simple and easy to use platform that students and teachers to improve one of the essential skills in life: writing.

The Result

Efficiency results in cost savings

After performance improvements, Write About was able to downscale their application tier and resize their Aurora database back to a smaller operational level, leading to business cost savings. Write About was able to handle the rest of the seasonal traffic with confidence and also had a long-term plan in place to move forward.

Why BoltOps

DevOps that Accelerates

BoltOps architects, builds, and deploys AWS infrastructure so engineering teams can focus on their product. BoltOps brings a software developer's background perspective to the infrastructure table. The infrastructure is easy to use and customize. BoltOps uses many powerful tools to achieve this. Learn more at boltops.com.