Segment Case Study

2015

Segment provides a service used by businesses to collect customer data in a single hub for later use in analytics, marketing, and for other purposes. The San Francisco–based firm has a broad customer base, ranging from startups to enterprises, including brand names such as Nokia, Angie’s List, Conde Nast, The Motley Fool, and Salesforce Foundation.

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Switching to Amazon ECS has greatly simplified running a service without needing to worry about provisioning or availability."

Calvin French-Owen
Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, Segment

The Challenge

  • Company originally ran every application, including API backends, data ingestion, and others, on instances alone.
  • Provisioning applications was manually intensive, requiring running startup scripts and manual installs; instances wound up being out of sync because configuration settings were all different.
  • Moved to Docker for a better configuration management. Applications can be defined with Docker Compose for consistency and remain stateless.
  • Wanted to move their new Docker-based architecture into production, but needed a way to manage and schedule containers at scale.
  • Evaluated many open source options, but had been using other AWS products, and wanted a solution that was simple and would integrate with the AWS ecosystem.

Why Amazon Web Services

  • Started using Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) as a way to offload cluster management and container orchestration to a service.
  • Different services such as API, CDN, and App are deployed on different Amazon ECS clusters. Each service is defined by a task definition indicating which version of the container to run, which cluster to choose, and how many containers should be deployed.
  • Uses Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 for service discovery. Each service registers to an ELB and Amazon Route 53 points a local entry at each ELB. Services can communicate with each other through DNS.
  • Segment uses Datadog, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, to provide metrics and visualizations on usage and latency.

The Benefits

  • Improved availability thanks to multiple Availability Zones
  • Easily runs new services
  • Minimizes container management

About Segment

Segment provides a service used by businesses to collect customer data in a single hub for later use in analytics, marketing, and for other purposes.

Benefits of AWS

  • Improved availability thanks to multiple Availability Zones
  • Easily runs new services
  • Minimizes container management

AWS Services Used

Amazon ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers.

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Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.

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Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

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