Echelon Fitness Achieves Elastic Scaling to Meet 1,000% Annual Growth on AWS

Echelon Fitness provides state-of-the-art exercise equipment through which users in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom access live, on-demand, studio-quality workouts. The fitness application was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2017. When Echelon Fitness saw exponential growth in 2020, it turned to AWS Premier Consulting Partner Onica to optimize its infrastructure. As a result, it reduced costs and improved performance and security for millions of global users.

Echelon Fitness launched its full streaming solution and iOS and Android apps in 3 months. “Without AWS, we wouldn’t have been able to grow as fast and as reliably as we have,” says John Santo, chief technology officer at Echelon. “It doesn’t take long to add modalities to our system.”

The Echelon Fitness user base grew 1,000 percent year over year from 2019. As the company expanded, it had to meet regional security regulations. Its live stream video delivery had to handle high demand, yet the fitness video streams crashed even with just 1,200 attendees.

To scale and increase security, Echelon teamed up with cloud-native services provider Onica. “We provide advice, direction, and hands-on delivery so organizations become more efficient. We were able to correct the scaling issue and introduce savings opportunities as well,” says Jeremy Bendat, vice president of business development and partnerships for Onica. Echelon saved $25,000 per month through optimizations identified by Onica.

Echelon Fitness uses automatic scaling groups through AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a simple-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. In December 2020, the company hosted over 2 million classes, compared to 800,000 classes in 2019. It went from offering 4 live classes a day to 20–50.

These live classes were distributed globally using Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. Now Echelon's virtual classes can handle 10,000 or more attendees without issue.

Onica aided Echelon in implementing a disaster recovery plan using Amazon S3 Glacier, a secure, durable, and low-cost cloud storage for data archiving and long-term backup. Amazon S3 Glacier enables automated, encrypted, restorable backups and a lifecycle plan that places older data in cold storage. “The system separates our data storage, so our customers’ fitness data is safe,” says Santo.

Echelon Fitness opened new headquarters and a technology facility, where it plans to build a studio for class creation. In 2021, the company received funding from Goldman Sachs to help further its users’ experience, and Echelon launched a new leaderboard with enhanced interactive features based on customer feedback in March.

Echelon continues to work with Onica to integrate AWS machine learning services into its live stream network to gain user insights and build a recommendation engine that can suggest new content and classes to users based on their previous selections. Onica is also helping Echelon improve the service by adding subtitle information to videos and streams.

With the help of Onica and AWS, Echelon has expanded exponentially and cut costs while providing a global interactive community fitness experience. “We can take on more work,” says Santo. “Our customers see more features and know we’re listening to them. That’s important for our company’s trajectory.”

To learn more about Echelon's journey to the cloud, check out the video here.