eHarmony accelerates internal pre-launch innovation process on AWS
This online dating website gained a faster test stage in the launch of new services and features for its 10 million+ members, who are looking for their perfect love match.
Industry
Technology
Challenge
eHarmony was faced with a lag in its ability to launch new services and features due to a slow internal pre-deployment testing procedure and wanted to speed up the process.
Solutions Cloud Native Development Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)Our customer
eHarmony launched in 2000 as the first algorithm-based dating website. By 2024, it had 10 million active users and over 45 million registered members. eHarmony considers itself to be a big data technology company, with most of its data coming from the multiple millions of member dating matches made each year.
“The biggest benefit to using technology like AWS is the ability to react quickly to our business needs. Rackspace Technology allowed our team to hit the ground running.”
The obstacles they faced
eHarmony faced a persistent challenge in its service and feature development environment on what it calls its “runways.” These are sandbox-type development areas that it uses to test drive its innovations before deploying them. After building new services and features, and before deploying them into production, the company’s IT team deploys them on a runway.
Runways allow the eHarmony development team to put all the systems together and test them in an integrated way, signaling when a new feature or service is ready for takeoff. If everything goes well on the runway, the team feels confident that it will go well in production, too.
However, the runways were manual systems and the IT team needed a more efficient way to employ runways, because its existing process was taking too long and slowing down its ability to launch new services and features that would benefit its millions of members.
“Now we can spin up a runway on demand. It enables us to innovate at a much faster pace. And it’s going to help more people find love.”
How we helped
To achieve eHarmony’s efficient runway operation goals, it needed to move the runway infrastructure to the cloud — which for them meant AWS. This required a learning process for the company and a reliable partner it could lean on for guidance. Rackspace Technology filled that role, enabling its internal operations team to ramp up quickly.
The internal development team wanted a push-button deployment versus the manual setup process they were using. To achieve maximum efficiency, they needed to be able to build an entire runway at the push of a button, use it and then scrap it when they were finished.
Another hurdle to overcome was reducing testing speed latency. Rackspace Technology deployed eHarmony’s new runway environment in a hybrid cloud using AWS Direct Connect from its data center to AWS. This significantly reduced latency in testing, which allowed the team to use runways in a hybrid setup with the database still sited locally on-premises.
What we achieved together
Rackspace Technology engineers worked on-site at eHarmony, side-by-side with its team. This led to both collaboration and the ability to pivot rapidly throughout the project — and move quickly toward a final solution.
With the advent of the digitally driven runways, eHarmony DevOps engineers can spin up multiple runways in parallel versus just one at a time. Also, provisioning and productivity have accelerated, runways can scale up and down and costs are more manageable.
eHarmony plans to leverage technical expertise from Rackspace Technology for additional projects, such as adding disaster recovery and moving its production infrastructure to AWS, as well.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a hybrid, multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across AI, applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimizing returns into the future.
As a global hybrid, multicloud technology services pioneer, we deliver innovative capabilities to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and create incredible experiences. Named a best place to work, year after year according to Fortune, Forbes and Glassdoor, we attract and develop world-class talent to deliver the best expertise to our customers. Everything we do is wrapped in Fanatical Experience® — our obsession with customer success that drives us to help each customer work faster, smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
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