New Relic's Global Vice President of Engineering Wendy Shepperd on Modernizing on AWS

New Relic serves tens of thousands of engineers, who use it daily to plan, build, deploy, and run their most critical applications and infrastructure. Explosive growth and scalability barriers led the company to lift and shift from on-premises databases to the cloud. The New Relic Database (NRDB) platform’s cluster of distributed services runs on thousands of CPU cores for large queries, scanning trillions of data points to return answers to customers in milliseconds. In 2020, New Relic migrated its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), building a cell-based architecture for long-term scalability and geographic expansion. 

In this presentation, Wendy Shepperd, global vice president of engineering at New Relic, shares how cellular architecture flexibly meets the needs of New Relic’s customers by enabling the tailoring of cells for customers in highly regulated industries and provisioning its largest-capacity cells with beefed-up compute and storage resources. It also allows for continuous building and decommissioning of cells for functionality and security upgrades. New Relic selected AWS for its breadth of services and global footprint, employing solutions such as AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS edge services.