RightScale Case Studies

Empowering DevOps at The Resumator

I'd highly recommend RightScale for companies of any size that would rather focus on their business rather than building operational management tools.

Chris Armstrong, Director of Engineering

About The Resumator

The Resumator, a Pittsburgh-based software-as-a-service company, produces HR software for fast-growing companies to help them hire with confidence. Hiring in the competitive market for engineering and technology professionals can be tough, and The Resumator provides a web-based applicant tracking solution as an alternative for companies who do not want to use expensive recruiters. And anyone in the organization can use it, not just HR.

Founded in 2009, The Resumator now has more than 6,500 customers in 30 countries and has helped process more than 2.5 million applicants. It has been widely adopted by venture-backed technology companies, including Klout, Instagram, Pinterest, and HootSuite, as well as by the campaigns of both 2012 U.S. presidential candidates.

Cloud Challenges

The Resumator knows about hiring challenges from first-hand experience because it helps its customers deal with them every day. So as director of engineering, Chris Armstrong knew he wanted to do everything possible to keep his team focused on building a great product rather than managing infrastructure. The Resumator had just a single developer and did not want to bring on a systems administrator as its second engineering hire.

The Resumator had been using S3 for storage along with a hosting company for compute for the first year. In the summer of 2011, after months of steady growth, The Resumator optimized its job listing syndication. Over a single week, traffic tripled to the application, resulting in a very noticeable slowdown in response time. Armstrong knew he had to take action to get the application at peak performance.

The RightScale Solution

As this slowdown was taking place, Armstrong began moving The Resumator to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). He began evaluating a number of cloud management solutions to build out and manage this new AWS environment for The Resumator. Ultimately he chose RightScale because of its onboarding support, ability to automate scaling, and powerful monitoring features. Within 11 days of the slowdown on its previous platform, The Resumator was up and running on AWS using RightScale. The Resumator contracted RightScale Professional Services to build out its application deployment, including customized RightScale ServerTemplatesTM and RightScripts to form the basis of its application configuration on AWS. ServerTemplates encapsulate all of the configuration information, from multiregion images to boot sequences to operational scripts, that The Resumator uses to manage its applications.

In short order, Armstrong had ServerTemplates that used PHP and MySQL for the main application and HAProxy for load balancing. He found the process to be speedy and appreciated that "the RightScale support team we have worked with when we've had issues have been willing to go above and beyond our support agreement to help us figure out what's going on."

Since then, Armstrong's team has built their own ServerTemplates as they have expanded their application and services. "Now it takes just a day or two to build out a new deployment using our published ServerTemplates," he explains. "For example, I created and customized a new database tier in two days."

Hands-Off Capacity Management

We scaled our business so quickly and so effectively using RightScale

Chris Armstrong, Director of Engineering

The Resumator uses Amazon Web Services to run its staging and production environments of some 15 instances, although the number of instances is continually growing and shrinking with demand. With RightScale, The Resumator dynamically scales its application tier to handle traffic and load changes throughout the day, such as typical spikes in traffic around lunch time and dips in traffic after the business day. RightScale also handles high availability by spreading the servers across Availability Zones in case of a datacenter outage.

In addition to auto-scaling, The Resumator uses RightScale heavily for monitoring and alerting. For the engineering team, this saves a lot of time. "We don't have to be in the dashboard all the time," Armstrong says. "We have monitoring set up so we get alerted if something is wrong."

The Resumator also integrates RightScale with several technologies to give it a complete devops management stack, including NewRelic for application monitoring.

Running Lean

Using RightScale has enabled our tiny engineering team to focus on feature development (and thus driving revenue!) rather than frustrating sys admin tasks.

Chris Armstrong, Director of Engineering

The most important benefit of RightScale for The Resumator is empowering developers to manage operations when necessary. Rather than hiring a dedicated systems administrator, Armstrong was instead able to hire additional developers to continue building out the features that The Resumator needs to succeed in the market and drive revenue.

The company's engineering team is a true devops environment, with developers such as Armstrong managing operations as needed. With seven engineers on staff, The Resumator is only now looking to hire a systems administrator. Using RightScale has enabled The Resumator to get started on AWS with best practice architectures, scale its application, and remain lean.