RallyUp campaign raises $6.75 million in one week with zero downtime on AWS
This industry-leading fundraising platform relied on a highly elastic cloud infrastructure for a high-traffic promotion to support Nike and The Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Industry
Non-Profit
Challenge
RallyUp’s platform needed to uplevel its infrastructure for a one-week fundraising promotion for Nike and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for a Nike Mag “Back to the Future” self-lacing shoe giveaway.
Solutions Cloud Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)Our customer
RallyUp built the world’s most advanced fundraising platform so that philanthropic organizations can have the support they need to raise funds and help build a better world. Its industry-leading platform includes a wide range of cutting-edge tools to support fundraising campaigns around the globe — from ensuring children have easy access to clean drinking water to saving the planet’s sea turtles.
The obstacles they faced
When RallyUp was approached by Nike and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research about a one-week fundraising promotion, the company realized it was time to uplevel its platform so that it could support this major undertaking, which was likely to raise significant funds for Parkinson’s disease research. What’s more, the increase in capabilities would support its vast range of customers around the world who raise funds for their own good causes.
RallyUp faced multiple challenges in hosting a short-term, high-traffic event. These ranged from managing unpredictable traffic spikes to enhancing security protocols. The company's needs included:
- Scalable infrastructure capable of handling significant, unpredictable spikes in traffic
- A guarantee of zero downtime
- The ability to rapidly update its .NET application servers with new code revisions
- Robust security measures, given that high-profile events often attract malicious actors
- Creation of duplicate environments to concurrently support an internal campaign for Nike employees and a public campaign
Infrastructure elastically scaled to serve over two million users during a one-week fundraising campaign — including one million on the first day.
How we helped
To meet RallyUp’s need for a more elastic infrastructure, Rackspace Technology created a self-healing environment that scaled up and down based on end-user demand. This was achieved by designing and building the environment using infrastructure-as-code concepts. That allowed for auditing, rapid deployments and multiple identical environments for development and testing activities.
The cloud architecture followed AWS Well-Architected Framework guidelines, including:
- AWS CloudFormation stacks for each part of the environment (e.g., Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, WAP, ELB and auto-scaling groups)
- Application and server automation using Chef InSpec
- Client traffic encryption via ELB, CloudFront and ACM
- Coordinated load tests to determine instance and database rightsizing
- CloudWatch alarms for application health monitoring
- DDoS mitigation via CloudWatch, Lambda, CloudFront and WAF
To provide the infrastructure for these applications, the solution used various foundational AWS services such as VPC, EC2, S3, Route 53, RDS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Lambda and IAM.
What we achieved together
The fundraiser for the Nike Mag sneakers raised $6.75 million for The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research with 100% of the proceeds going toward high-impact programs to accelerate a cure for Parkinson’s disease.
During the one-week event, RallyUp’s new cloud infrastructure was elastically scaled to serve over two million users and hundreds of thousands of entries, including supporting nearly half of the traffic (one million users) on the first day of the promotion.
The AWS solution installed by Rackspace Technology achieved the following outcomes:
- Zero downtime
- Increased service uptime and reliability by orders of magnitude
- Significantly reduced the number of late-night alerts to engineers
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.
Let’s Talk Strategy
Tell us a little about your challenges and we’ll contact you.
You may withdraw your consent to receive additional information from Rackspace Technology at any time. Information collected in this form is subject to the Rackspace Technology Privacy Notice.
Rackspace Technology Support
To create a ticket or chat with a specialist regarding your account, log into your account.
Support Phone
1-800-961-4454
International Support
+1-512-361-4935
Help Documentation
System status
Rackspace Technology Careers
Rackspace Technology accelerates the value of the cloud during every phase of a customer’s digital transformation. Join us on our mission.