Urban Airship

Company: Urban Airship
Industry: Mobile
Carpathia Services: Cloud Computing, Compliance

Why Carpathia?

• Carpathia developed a solution with Urban Airship that takes advantage of AWS Direct Connect Service, allowing Urban Airship to utilize a hybrid of AWS and a fully managed hosting solution from Carpathia. The combined solution allows Urban Airship to balance the performance and price of their infrastructure requirements to support their growth. By using Carpathia's network and data center footprint, Urban Airship is able to meet the geographic requirements of its customers.
• Carpathia's global reach allows Urban Airship to deliver its services to customers and devices around the world in 13 countries spanning 5 continents.
• Carpathia's solution-based approach provides Urban Airship with multiple disaster recovery, high availability and low latency options as they continue to expand globally.
• Carpathia's managed solution for the base of Urban Airship’s IT requirements coupled with AWS for burst capacity provided Urban Airship with a cost-efficient solution vs. pure cloud.
• Carpathia's capability to provision and operate the various types of equipment Urban Airship requires, such as supporting extremely high numbers of user sessions and connections, allows Urban Airship to deliver services in a predictable, low latency manner that would not be possible with a pure cloud solution.

Background
The engine behind thousands of mobile applications, Urban Airship’s breakthrough technology powers some of the world’s most well-known and successful apps, helping top brands ensure their mobile app initiatives are engaging, scalable and profitable. Urban Airship provides push notifications, rich mobile messaging and in-app purchase services, as well as analytics and campaign management tools, for mobile app publishers. The company delivers roughly 14 thousand mobile messages per minute and adds thousands of devices to its platform each day.

Challenge
After a period of significant growth, Urban Airship’s expanding customer base and colossal data-collection activities increasingly demanded both a dedicated infrastructure and a flexible scalable cloud. To meet these demands and continue to exceed customer expectations for Urban Airship’s stable, scalable, low-latency and high-throughput mobile messaging platform, the mobile services provider wanted to connect its AWS cloud servers with bare-metal servers in extremely close geographic proximity. Using Direct Connect, Urban Airship was able to situate both elements in its hybrid-cloud infrastructure within a few hundred yards of each other, thus allowing connectivity speeds of approximately 1 millisecond.

Approach
As Urban Airship searched for the right solution to meet its needs, the company established ten critical requirements:

1. Connectivity to service customers and devices around the world
2. Geographic proximity to both AWS and Urban Airship's bare-metal servers to provide low latency and data connection speeds of approximately 1 millisecond
3. Ability to support Urban Airship’s hybrid-cloud infrastructure to offer elasticity to keep up with storage and compute growth
4. A vast geographic footprint to provide adequate disaster recovery, high availability and low latency to the company’s services as it grows
5. A customized solution that will provision and operate the various types of equipment Urban Airship needs
6. An economic model with the ability to scale so that Urban Airship can continue to offer competitively priced products
7. Business model flexibility to work with Urban Airship through a MSP to colocation transition
8. A strong partner relationship
9. A strong reputation and happy existing customers, including Spotify, Meridian Knowledge Systems, Inc., SaaSplaza and other companies with similar data requirements to Urban Airship
10. SAS 70 compliance

Solution
By partnering with both Carpathia and Amazon Web Services, Urban Airship was able to meet all of its requirements, an investment that provides many positive benefits for Urban Airship’s customers. The connectivity, geographic footprint, cloud elasticity and customized kit all combine to provide for robust mobile messaging worldwide. Additionally, the economics of Urban Airship’s hosting environment will continue to allow the company to provide customers with the best value for its products. Further, Urban Airship is now running on the hosting architecture that will allow the company to provide customers with the next iterations of its existing products.