At Rackspace Solve New York, Jon Hyman, CIO of AppBoy, shared how AppBoy uses Rackspace’s DevOps Automation Services to increase app engagement for their clients, including Urban Outfitters and Shape Magazine. With Rackspace’s managed cloud providing support, Appboy was able to excel rapid customer growth and scale through DevOps.

1. CIO | APPBOY J ON HYMAN
Solving for
Rapid Customer
Growth and Scale
Through DevOps

2. Dedicated Public Cloud Private Cloud
Cloud Office
Hybrid Cloud
Databases Big Data
Managed
Virtualization
Storage
DevOps Content Commerce ObjectRocket
Rackspace Managed Cloud

3. A LITTLE BIT
ABOUT JON
& APPBOY
Jon Hyman
CIO :: @jon_hyman
!Harvard
Bridgewater
is a marketing
automation
platform for apps

4. Use Case: Urban Outfitters
Announce sales, foster
community: 25% of
MAU view news feed
Doubled Twitter
engagement via
advertising challenges
in the news feed
3% push reactivation
on iOS
Snowstorm
push

5. Use Case: Shape Magazine
Promote related titles
Create stronger campaigns around
free trials and subscription sales
38% more downloads, 63% revenue
increase for Muscle & Fitness Hers

6. • What is DevOps?
• How Appboy uses
Rackspace’s DevOps
Service to scale
Agenda

7. Solving for Rapid Customer Growth and Scale Through DevOps:
What is DevOps?

8. Unified development and operations
• All the stuff that my developers don’t want to deal with
• Things that reduce risk, increase agility, and get us faster
time to market

9. Unified development and operations
• All the stuff that my developers don’t want to deal with
• Things that reduce risk, increase agility, and get us faster
time to market
Examples
• Build system, continuous integration
• Release management
• Server automation

10. Solving for Rapid Customer Growth and Scale Through DevOps:
Appboy and DevOps

11. Appboy architecture (simplified)

12. Move to Rackspace
• Better cost - had tried hiring
devops hire in-house
• Support team
• Started on Heroku
• Needed more customization,
went to a PaaS
• Wanted full control
of environment
- Physical and cloud servers
- Private subnets
- Global expansion path

13. Handling bursty
customers
Data points per hour
3/21/2014 3/28/2014

14. Appboy managing constant scale
0"
20,000,000"
40,000,000"
60,000,000"
80,000,000"
100,000,000"
120,000,000"
140,000,000"
160,000,000"
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Jobs/Events+Per+Day+
Backend"Jobs"Per"Day"(1"Week"Moving"Avg.)"
Move to Rackspace

15. • Elasticity of server fleet
• Ability to rapidly iterate on
code and architecture
• Good monitoring and testing
capabilities
Handling
burstiness and
constant scale
(A good support team)

16. • Started together in Dec, 2013;
fully cutover Feb, 2014
• Knowledgeable about server
automation
• Responsive to alerts, tickets, issues
Appboy’s
experience
with Rackspace
DevOps
(A good support team)

17. Lessons Learned
Automate code deployments early on
Be able to provision new application
servers as fast as possible
DevOps needs constant up-keep
as application grows

18. Thanks!
jon@appboy.com
@appboy @jon_hyman