Wattpad Uses Boundary and AWS to Help Scale Storytelling Platform

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwired – Feb 20, 2014) – Boundary announces that Wattpad, the world’s largest community of readers and writers, is using its service to monitor and improve performance on its Amazon cloud-hosted infrastructure. In the last two years, Wattpad has experienced explosive growth with 20 million people joining the community. “Our tremendous growth stems from the fact that we’re offering readers and writers something they’ve never had before — a direct connection with each other,” says Charles Chan, head of engineering at Wattpad.

With marketplace traction, however, Wattpad needed comprehensive strategies for performance. The company hosts its website 100% on AWS public cloud, and it needs early insight into anomalies. While Wattpad deploys industry best practices including switching between different AWS zones for optimal reliability, the engineering team is always looking for better visibility into system hotspots and unplanned downtime.

Wattpad uses several tools for infrastructure monitoring, yet the company didn’t have a consistent method of tracking network bandwidth usage and traffic patterns. The engineering team began hunting for a new toolset, and determined that Boundary could fill the gap. “With Boundary, we would have been able to pinpoint performance issues much faster including determining if certain availability zones were in trouble.”

Since deploying Boundary’s cloud-based consolidated operations management software, the company has found additional benefits beyond proactively monitoring uptime on AWS. Wattpad used Boundary to isolate an issue within the search application that caused a system outage. Wattpad also used Boundary to identify possible breaking points in the website to prepare for 2013 holiday season peak traffic. “Boundary gives us an edge because we can constantly monitor the network traffic across all nodes within the system, and magnify issues that need to be handled quickly,” Chan says. “We can also anticipate the impact of changes as we scale and locate areas for optimizing the website. The Boundary staff worked with us over a period of several months to demo the system in our environment and they’ve always been there to help us quickly when we needed it.”

“Wattpad’s business is defined by high volumes of daily users and constantly updated data streams and it depends on the scalability and flexibility it gets with AWS,” says Gary Read, CEO at Boundary. “Our cloud-based operations monitoring software is designed to monitor dynamic and always-changing environments like Wattpad. We are excited to help this innovative social platform grow and succeed around the world, and in the cloud.”

About Boundary

Boundary allows customers to monitor their entire IT environments from a single point of control and is uniquely designed to deal with challenges stemming from modern, highly distributed applications. Boundary’s best-in-class enterprise event management service centralizes and correlates events, alerts and notifications from any source, enabling Ops/DevOps professionals to quickly see the total picture. Event management data is enriched by Boundary’s ability to provide a real-time, all-the-time snapshot of the logical application topology. Boundary is privately held, based in Mountain View, and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners. For more information on Boundary visit us on the web at www.boundary.com or on www.twitter.com/boundary.