Amazon Aurora Helps Deputy Improve Performance by 30% and Expand Customer Base to Large Organisations

Deputy is a cloud-based workforce scheduling platform designed to automate the complex calculations required to optimally schedule shift work. More than 330,000 workplaces and 1.4 million shift workers around the world rely on Deputy software to automate scheduling and facilitate workforce management.

Born in the cloud, Deputy’s workforce scheduling platform has been powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) since the very beginning. The original platform was built using Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with self-managed MySQL databases on Amazon EC2. As the company grew, it committed to minimizing operational burdens for its engineers, which meant moving to fully managed Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “Amazon RDS allowed us to focus on our product, while leaning on Amazon scaling up and down to effortlessly serve our fast growing, largest customers,” said Deepesh Banerji, chief product officer at Deputy.

While Amazon RDS freed Deputy’s engineering team from infrastructure management, the company had its sights set on other scaling solutions that would supercharge its growth by resonating with large-scale enterprises with even more complex scheduling needs. In particular, the team wanted a solution capable of handling Deputy’s read-heavy application without replication lag. The company also wanted to be sure the platform could handle the larger volumes of data and queries coming from its growing stable of midmarket and enterprise customers. After working with the AWS team on a proof of concept, Deputy chose to move its workforce scheduling platform to Amazon Aurora and run on Aurora MySQL version 3, which is wire-compatible with MySQL 8.0.

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that delivers faster queries, decreased latency, high performance, and reliability. Its high throughput rate makes it particularly well suited for computationally heavy workloads like Deputy’s. “Our data stores are massive—each cluster has up to 10,000 databases, and each database can have as many as 200 tables,” explained Rajini Carpenter, vice president of engineering at Deputy. “That’s close to 2 million tables in a single cluster, and just watching how Amazon Aurora handles that is amazing.”

Amazon Aurora also natively integrates with other critical components of Deputy’s infrastructure. For example, Deputy uses Amazon OpenSearch Service for data-powered business insights and has built a data pipeline using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and AWS Lambda to load streaming data into OpenSearch clusters. In addition, Deputy offers a touch-free facial-analysis feature with biometric validation for employees to clock in and out, built using Amazon Rekognition. “We’ve received a tremendous amount of support from AWS to fuel us to go upmarket and serve larger, more complex businesses,” said Qamal Kosim-Satyaputra, senior director of engineering at Deputy. “We wouldn’t be here without their support.”