Rippling transforms data architecture for innovation using AWS

Rippling is a compound product company, with over 30 integrated applications that are built on shared platform capabilities such as permissions, workflows, and analytics. This approach connects workforce data across applications and creates a one-stop shop for payroll, human resources, talent, IT, finance, and more. Every day, Rippling processes millions of transactions for over 20,000 businesses.

“We’re ultimately building software to support almost all business applications,” says Albert Strasheim, chief technology officer at Rippling. “To meet this goal, we need to store and model the underlying business data. The big challenge for us is how to scale up this system.”

Rippling’s previous data architecture relied on a mix of AWS services and third-party solutions, which created operational complexity and limited its ability to scale. To deliver on its vision of streamlining operational workflows, Rippling needed to consolidate its tech stack.

The comprehensive suite of purpose-built database and analytics services on AWS, combined with proven migration tools and global infrastructure, offered the foundation that Rippling needed. In addition, the company would be able to maintain the performance and reliability that its customers demanded.

As Rippling scaled to target large enterprises, it recognized an opportunity to empower its customers to build their own business processes directly on its platform. So, Rippling collaborated with AWS technical teams to architect a foundation that could scale to meet this goal.

Rippling began consolidating its tech stack by migrating some of its NoSQL workloads to Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)—a fully managed database. The company migrated over 100 NoSQL database clusters with near-zero downtime, maintaining service availability for business-critical applications such as payroll and time and attendance. Amazon DocumentDB serves as the primary database for most of Rippling’s products, facilitating agile development and rapid iteration through flexible schema changes.

Working alongside AWS, Rippling built new transformative products—Custom Objects and App Studio—on a unified data foundation. Using Custom Objects, customers can onboard their own entities and data structures directly into Rippling through an intuitive UI. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, which provides high performance and availability at global scale, serves as the primary database for this product. This PostgreSQL foundation reduces engineering overhead by empowering Rippling to use built-in query-optimization capabilities that were not available with the NoSQL approach it used previously.

Nor is that all. Using Custom Objects, customers can generate business insights directly from Rippling’s interface with no need for separate business intelligence teams to perform basic reporting. The infrastructure improved data freshness, reducing lag from 1 minute to milliseconds and delivering near real-time analytics, by utilizing a Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) approach on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

When Rippling’s customers define custom fields and data structures on Custom Objects, Aurora PostgreSQL stores this information by using a multi-tenant metadata schema. These customers are able to work with dedicated database tables while Rippling manages the underlying complexity. To help customers quickly find and navigate their custom data and workforce information, Custom Objects uses Amazon OpenSearch Service—which simplifies AI-powered search, observability, and vector database operations.

Separately, with App Studio, Rippling’s customers can create custom applications that inherit all Rippling’s capabilities—workflows, permissions, approvals, analytics, and reporting—while operating on Custom Objects. This product uses the same Aurora PostgreSQL foundation as Custom Objects to store application logic and user-defined schemas. Additionally, Rippling Functions allow customers to define their business logic in an isolated way. Built on AWS Lambda—an event-driven compute service for running code without thinking about servers or clusters—Rippling Functions processes customer-written code in isolated environments.

Rippling’s new products have made it possible for its enterprise customers to build hundreds of new business applications, ranging from vehicle fleet management to product launch trackers, adding their own bespoke datasets and business logic alongside the company’s built-in suite of services. “Using AWS databases, we help our customers automate workflows and integrations, get the answers they want, and accelerate decision-making,” says Gerhard Esterhuizen, senior vice president of platform at Rippling.

Rippling is reimagining how businesses manage their workforce and helping them streamline operational workflows at scale. By consolidating data into a single source of truth, the company now delivers richer insights with greater speed and reliability. “Using AWS, we migrated over 100 NoSQL database clusters with near-zero downtime, delivered near real-time analytics, and launched two new products,” says Strasheim. “We’ve been incredibly happy with the close collaboration.”

Rippling can now process data changes and deliver insights to customers quickly, and smaller engineering teams can support increasingly complex systems while improving operational efficiency. With these performance gains, the company is well positioned to reach its goal to become a unified system for business applications. “With the support of the AWS team, we were able to figure out how to effectively architect our solutions and scale our systems,” says Strasheim.