KnowBe4 Seamlessly Scales to 22 Billion Events Using Amazon EventBridge

KnowBe4 is a leading global cybersecurity training organization with cutting-edge technology. The organization equips cybersecurity professionals with comprehensive training and software solutions to strengthen organizational security and protect critical assets. KnowBe4’s customers are organizations from a wide variety of fields, including finance, energy, and healthcare.

The engineering team at KnowBe4 continually improves operational efficiency and workload resilience by applying loosely coupled, serverless architectures wherever possible. However, with a growing feature set and expanding need to share data across systems, KnowBe4 realized that its existing queue-based decoupling strategy that used queues and topics had points of duplication and inefficiencies. To minimize the impact on development teams and increase engineering velocity, KnowBe4 wanted to implement an AWS architecture to simplify the engineering architecture and promote loosely coupled services with minimal duplication.

“We frequently had to build multiple queues to send the same message to different services,” says Kevin Breton, distinguished engineer at KnowBe4. “We kept following the same pattern and realized there had to be a better way.”

The organization’s primary existing architecture was also monolithic in nature. KnowBe4 anticipated that decoupling the architecture would improve reliability and ease the development and onboarding of new functions and services.

In 2023, KnowBe4 decided to move to a serverless, event-driven architecture. To do so, the organization used Amazon EventBridge, which developers can use to build event-driven applications at scale across AWS, existing systems, or software-as-a-service applications. Within about 8 months, between January and September 2023, KnowBe4 developed its new event-driven architecture. “Amazon EventBridge was a natural selection for us,” says Breton. “It was a good fit from the very beginning.”

KnowBe4 also needed an audit log and decided this would be the perfect first use case to test the new architecture. For the audit log, the company used AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (AWS EBA), which accelerates organizations’ cloud journeys with an outcome-focused transformation methodology. At a multi-day onsite event, KnowBe4 engineers and developers worked alongside AWS to create a minimum viable product for their audit log. “AWS EBA connected us with the technical experts of the services we needed to implement,” says Andy Suarez, vice president of engineering at KnowBe4. “This was a significant accelerator, which helped us identify possible scaling concerns, cost ramifications, and long-term maintainability.”

The organization then began migrating its engineering practices to this new architecture pattern, educating engineers on how the new architecture would advance KnowBe4’s engineering productivity.

Using Amazon EventBridge, KnowBe4 transformed its operations with a scalable, event-driven architecture. The architecture was originally designed to handle burst traffic of up to 20,000 events per second and managed 22 billion events in 2024 alone. The system has also achieved 99.99 percent uptime since it was implemented. “Our uptime and performance have been better since we decoupled the services,” says Breton. “If we have a service that has issues, we can use Amazon EventBridge to replay missed events and recover any impacted data.”

KnowBe4’s developers are also able to bring new services and features to market quickly due to the event-driven architecture, which uses Amazon EventBridge to reduce infrastructure code and promote loosely decoupled services. Within several hours of the event-driven architecture’s implementation, two new features were deployed to production, 3 months ahead of schedule. “We’ve increased our engineering velocity using Amazon EventBridge, and it’s less work to get things done, which is fantastic,” says Breton.

This new architecture is also accelerating KnowBe4’s artificial intelligence (AI) adoption journey. The asynchronous nature of AI modeling and analysis lends itself to an event-driven architecture. “We were able to jump-start our AI initiatives by building upon our event-driven architecture,” says Breton. “This let development teams quickly iterate on their new innovations.”

With its new architecture in place, KnowBe4 is excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. The event-driven architecture powered by Amazon EventBridge has proven a resilient and reliable foundation for the organization. “This architecture is a foundational piece of our AWS stack,” says Suarez. “It facilitates most of our AI workloads and all of our product feature development. It’s been revolutionary internally.”

KnowBe4 innovates cybersecurity training solutions to protect organizations worldwide, and its transition to this streamlined event-driven architecture is accelerating that mission. “We’re really excited to put our hands on new AWS technologies,” says Suarez. “Building scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient systems is how we continue delivering features and value for our customers.”