Actionstep Manages 400% More Traffic on Legal Platform with Amazon Aurora Serverless

Before migrating to a serverless infrastructure, Actionstep’s platform managed an average of 25,000 active users and hundreds of millions of queries daily. During peak times, traffic would surge by up to 400 percent within a single week, requiring extensive pre-planning for additional computing resources. Despite the efforts, the company still had to deal with challenges such as slower database response times and diminished performance due to workload unpredictability. Actionstep estimated that managing scaling and rectifying instance sizing in a multi-tenant environment to match peaks would require manual efforts which took away time otherwise spent on engineering activities.

Furthermore, the company had to put staff in charge of overseeing and managing 55 production database clusters for thousands of global customers. Even during non-peak periods, this demanding task required an average of up to 10 working hours each week.

Actionstep recognized that adopting a serverless infrastructure would allow the company to seamlessly scale workloads and meet real-time demands as its customer base grows. A serverless infrastructure would also allow Actionstep to adopt a variety of cutting-edge solutions.

In February 2023, Actionstep began migrating 36 terabytes worth of data from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, completing the move by October 2023—two months ahead of schedule. The platform upgrade removes much of the complexity of managing database instances and capacities, freeing the staff to focus on high-value tasks. For instance, the team can now prioritize working on customer-centric features.

More importantly, Actionstep now has the agility to scale flexibly and reliably to meet growing workload demands seamlessly. With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, Actionstep no longer has to worry about tenants hitting provisioned capacity limits and causing performance issues. With in-place scaling offered by the Aurora platform, Actionstep can now better support its customers, thus allowing legal professionals to retrieve documents, access case information, and perform tasks quickly and reliably. This has led to enhanced efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, a fast database minimizes the risk of working with outdated or inaccurate data, reducing the likelihood of errors and ensuring that legal practitioners can confidently rely on the information at hand.

AWS played a pivotal role in facilitating the seamless migration and providing training workshops and playbooks. AWS also helped Actionstep upgrade its PostgreSQL version 12 to version 13 with minimal service disruption. The team then used the RDS platform to seamlessly upgrade the database engine version in place to PostgreSQL v15 to take advantage of new optimizer features including improved sort performance. Actionstep also used Aurora Read Replicas to perform real-time data migration from RDS while keeping existing systems running and successfully cut over to the serverless infrastructure, minimizing downtime to just a few hours.