Crittercism: Solving Mobile Performance Issues for One Billion Users | AWS Startups Blog
Article Summary
Crittercism handles more traffic than Google Search (50K vs 40K requests/second) with just 3 DevOps engineers. How do they pull this off?
This AWS case study profiles Crittercism, a mobile app performance monitoring platform that grew from startup to supporting 1 billion monthly active users. VP of Engineering Paul Lappas shares their technical architecture and scaling strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Processes 0.5 trillion app sessions with only 3 DevOps staff
- Uses Node.js, Kafka, EMR, and Redshift for massive data pipelines
- Achieved 99.99% uptime while staying cost equivalent to self hosting
- Launched EU presence in under 1 month using infrastructure as code
- New transaction monitoring shows 20% of client transactions were silently failing
Critical Insight
Crittercism scaled to 1 billion users by leveraging AWS managed services, allowing a lean team to focus on product innovation instead of infrastructure management.
