We caught up with Eric Wahlforss who is the Co-Founder of one of our relatively new clients SoundCloud to see how they had found EveryCity.
What is SoundCloud?
SoundCloud lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.
Their service has grown from strength to strength and they currently have over 100k users, 200k+ music tracks and just announced 2,5m Euros of funding to accelerate their already rapid growth.
As many others in the past found after a few months of exponential growth they started to experience scaling problems, at which point they turned to EveryCity.
Needing to scale & migrate, quickly
Having had initial conversations with SoundCloud it got to a critical stage whereby there was no longer any room for manouver or error. They decided to go ahead and just in time too!
From making the decision to go ahead on a Thursday afternoon the entire site was migrated onto the new platform by the end of the following Wednesday, with only a little bit of non-critical tidy up left to complete.
They are now running on our Scalable Solaris Zones as well as using our Scalable Database Service which can scale MySQL to a massive 1200trans/s. As required we create zones in a matter of minutes either from scratch or replicating existing set-ups.
"From starting the move to finishing it took 3 days to get up to speed on the new platform"
We asked Eric perhaps an obvious question of why SoundCloud needed to scale. The main reason was the users, what they had found was that the speed of their application and site had a direct impact on the number of users signing up. Slower site, slower growth, less overall users and lower satisfaction.
This trend is not a new one however as growth is key to almost anyone running an internet start-up. The more users that can be aquired early on the more likelyhood that a company will succeed.
EveryCity's Service
We asked Eric how he and his team had found our service thus far. He personally found that the most important thing was the proactiveness of the team when working on issues that they had found as well as the high level of knowledge.
Issues which are raised include compiling custom versions of Ruby to optimising databases and setting up replication. A considerable amount of time is also spent advising and guiding on best practices.
Alongside the SoundCloud developers, EveryCity have been helping set-up replicas of live environments, testing Zones as well as setting up monitoring for MySQL replication and alerts for their transcoding queue.
Conclusion
SoundCloud have been very happy with their service thus far and the EveryCity team have really enjoyed working with their developers and engineers to get their site running as quickly and efficiently as possible. While we are sure that there will be many more challenges as time goes on, we know that we have what it takes to ensure their business.
