Foursquare doubles database performance and scales for rapid feature and capacity increase—all while keeping costs flat—by migrating from an AWS-only technology platform to a hybrid cloud in Equinix.
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Case study: Equinix & Foursquare
1. www.equinix.com
The Customer
Foursquare is a local search and discovery application that helps more than 45 million
users get personalized recommendation and deals based on where they, their friends, and
people like them have been. Foursquare’s Merchant Platform helps 1.6 million businesses
attract people nearby with mobile ads and promotional offers. The site has amassed more
than 5 billion check-ins and grows by millions more each day.
Business Challenge
Like many fast-growing web companies, Foursquare built the technology foundations for
its popular social networking site on Amazon Web Services (AWS). But as Foursquare’s
user base and business grew, the company hit technical and performance constraints with
its AWS-only infrastructure. Limits in transaction processing capacity, network transmission
speed and disk performance meant adding the resources needed to sustain Foursquare’s
rapid growth came with a considerable cost. Also, the company wanted more control over
technology platforms running critical services and better visibility into network performance.
It became clear to Foursquare’s engineering team that their technology platform needed
to grow out of the public cloud and migrate to a hybrid computing model—one in which
they could customize servers and data analytics capabilities for the unique needs of their
business while continuing to use the Amazon public cloud for data warehousing and spikes
in computing workloads. Foursquare’s engineers also recognized that where they built
the private computing component of their hybrid cloud could shape the performance and
efficiency of their entire cloud platform.
Solution and Value Realized
Foursquare chose Equinix’s data center campus in Ashburn, Va., just outside Washington,
D.C., as the home base for its hybrid cloud. Inside Equinix’s facility, Foursquare created
a private cloud to manage and analyze terabytes of data. The company installed large,
purpose-built database clusters such as mongoDB and a Hadoop cluster for big data
analytics. Foursquare then integrated its cutting-edge private cloud with the company’s
existing AWS services—a process that was greatly simplified by the availability of AWS
Direct Connect inside the Equinix data center housing Foursquare’s systems.
“The direct connection we got to the Amazon cloud in Equinix allowed us to migrate our
infrastructure to our own machines while maintaining reliable, low-latency access to legacy
systems in AWS,” said Robert Joseph, director of site reliability engineering at Foursquare.
“The migration was seamless, and it has allowed us to more than double the number of
requests processed while holding operational costs fixed.”
The direct connection between Foursquare’s newly built private cloud and the Amazon
public cloud enables Foursquare to efficiently and affordably manage and analyze huge
volumes of data. Via the direct connection, Foursquare can synchronize its massive
6+ terabyte data set nightly in six hours. Using a public network connection, the same
synchronization process could take days.
Business Results
• Doubled transaction processing
capabilities while keeping costs flat
• Five times faster data transfers
using direct connections within
Equinix instead of public networks
• Seamless migration from an all-
public cloud to a cutting-edge hybrid
cloud
• Achieved best of both worlds: the
efficient, customized computing
capabilities of a private cloud with
the scalability and on-tap features
of AWS
EQUINIX CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
FOURSQUARE
Foursquare doubles database
performance and scales for rapid
feature and capacity increase—all
while keeping costs flat—by migrating
from an AWS-only technology
platform to a hybrid cloud in Equinix
hybridcloud