Moving Infrastructure Securely to the Cloud Using AWS MAP with Pipedrive

Founded in 2010, Pipedrive is an Estonian company that provides a software-as-a-service product for customer relationship management. The sales solution is designed by salespeople to support small-to-medium businesses. Since its launch, the company has grown to serve more than 100,000 companies across 179 countries. In 2020, Pipedrive was valued at more than 1 billion dollars, achieving unicorn status. To continue its upward growth trajectory, Pipedrive wanted to improve the stability and scalability of its infrastructure so that it could serve more customers in different regions and offer a wider range of storage solutions.

Originally, Pipedrive ran its workloads in a private cloud. But as the business grew and its global expansion plans evolved, the company needed more flexibility to meet these increasing demands. Another challenge was the 6-month lead time that was required to provision new capacity, which restricted Pipedrive’s development agility and scalability. This resulted in increased cost from overprovisioning capacity because Pipedrive couldn’t access on-demand, elastic, and scalable infrastructure. Technology, availability, and performance challenges, such as unexpected downtime and resource gaps, reinforced Pipedrive’s commitment to migrating to AWS.

In 2016, Pipedrive’s team members attended an AWS Summit to learn more about AWS technology. Shortly afterward, the company built a proof of concept using AWS services to evaluate whether it could migrate from the private cloud to AWS without affecting availability. After the success of its proof of concept, the company migrated its internal workloads to AWS in 2018 and followed them up with its DevOps and testing environments in 2020. “By migrating to AWS, we created a cost-efficient and convenient infrastructure for our developers,” says Vladimir Zulin, senior infrastructure architect at Pipedrive. “We then thought, ‘How can we serve our customers on AWS?’”

In 2022, Pipedrive started yearlong planning to smoothly migrate its customer-data workloads from the private cloud to AWS. Through its previous proof-of-concept experience, the company knew what to expect in terms of the required timeline, effort, and changes. But it still needed to navigate the complexities of a full migration while minimizing both customer impact and double billing because of the company’s existing contract with its private-cloud provider. So, Pipedrive developed an incremental migration strategy. To support this, Pipedrive used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS experience migrating thousands of customers to the cloud. AWS MAP provides resources to empower businesses to migrate faster, minimize risks, and maximize the benefits of cloud adoption. Through AWS MAP, Pipedrive validated its infrastructure and plan, conducted a migration readiness assessment (MRA) to evaluate its migration preparation, and used the AWS Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) to identify areas for targeted AWS skills training. AWS MAP also helped Pipedrive offset its migration costs.

Because Pipedrive has a distributed architecture with multiple microservices, the company invested time in developing and testing its own data-migration framework. As part of the process, it used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere, as temporary storage. The company completed its active migration of customer data in three 6-week stages over three quarters. It migrated more than 100,000 customer-data workloads one by one during the customers’ off-hours in the evenings and on the weekends. To avoid overloading the new environments, Pipedrive started small and scaled up each region slowly as it migrated customers. In total, Pipedrive migrated 43 TB of customer data to Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a simple-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service. (See figure 1 below.)

Pipedrive now hosts more than 500 microservices on AWS. It powers its infrastructure using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. It uses a combination of Amazon EC2 M6i instances and Amazon EC2 T3 instances, low-cost general-purpose instances, which currently total more than 3,700. “Using a mix of AWS instance families in our development and testing environments empowers us to select the instances that deliver excellent performance for our customer-data workloads and databases,” says Zulin. Using these instances, Pipedrive has reduced its response time by 25 percent.

Pipedrive has also boosted performance, stability, reliability, and efficiency. In fact, the company has virtually solved hardware issues and avoided unplanned downtime. “Since our migration, we have been monitoring our customers’ API performance, and the numbers have dramatically improved,” says Kristjan Elias, director of infrastructure engineering at Pipedrive. “This has helped us gain a commercial advantage.”

Pipedrive has also generated cost savings by migrating to AWS. Gains in efficiency and performance reduced Pipedrive’s hosting cost per customer by up to 20 percent. Additionally, using Savings Plans, the company is saving approximately 40 percent on Amazon EC2 costs. “Costs have been significantly lower compared with before the migration,” says Elias.

Pipedrive completed its migration to AWS in 2024. Using the AWS capabilities, it can enhance its services and continue expanding. Additionally, AWS capabilities have helped Pipedrive meet its security and compliance objectives. The company is now focused on optimizing its costs and environments to maintain efficiency and continually improve performance for its customers. Next, Pipedrive plans to evaluate the potential use of managed services and explore additional use cases for its AWS Graviton–based Amazon EC2 instances, which are powered by custom-designed AWS Graviton server processors developed by AWS.

“Moving all our hosting to AWS has brought significant performance gains by streamlining our operations and enhancing scalability,” says Agur Jõgi, chief technology officer at Pipedrive. “The entire process of migrating to AWS was smooth, meeting all time and financial goals without compromising quality.”