Braze Relies on Rackspace's ObjectRocket for MongoDB Expertise

Braze has an enviable problem: managing its exponential growth. The company develops customer engagement software that businesses use to manage their customer-facing messaging across multiple channels. Braze’s customers can optimize their marketing and engagement by using push notifications, email, mobile, SMS and web-based campaigns. Braze elevates customer experience and engagement for dozens of well-known brands, including Domino’s Pizza, Venmo, HBO, Disney and Microsoft. With a current network of more than 1.8 billion monthly active users, Braze expects to hit two billion users in the very near future. Every month, tens of billions of messages to and from those users are managed through Braze’s technology, which is run on what may be the world’s largest installation of MongoDB, a cross-platform document-oriented database program. As the company’s runaway growth continues, so must its ability to scale while remaining highly available in order to maintain service at all times. That’s where ObjectRocket’s managed database service has proven to be critical.

Today, ObjectRocket’s database experts create, manage, adapt, and maintain 94+ terabytes-worth of data to keep up with Braze’s tremendous acceleration in the market.

From DIY to outside expertise

Back in 2012, Braze chose to architect a sharded MongoDB environment, preparing for future growth and scalability. That growth has exceeded expectations, as brand after brand uses Braze’s customer lifecycle engagement platform for their app, website, or email strategies. But managing the sheer volume of data, the number of shards and instances began presenting an operational challenge. Braze needed help architecting and maintaining such a massive and sprawling DB environment, while continuing to position itself for near-constant growth, well into the future. The Braze team saw Rackspace as the kind of credible, well-established, service-focused partner it needed, and since Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket, it became the natural choice. Another benefit to ObjectRocket’s cloud-based services: because data (such as SMS messages and email content) can be hosted anywhere, not just on Rackspace servers, Braze can continue to grow no matter where its customers’ data is hosted. This server-and geo-agnosticism makes ObjectRocket’s Database as a service offerings perfect for fast-growing market leaders like Braze. In addition to providing expert and effective on-demand database management solutions and keeping Braze’s instances highly available at all times, ObjectRocket’s superior customer support model is reflective of Rackspace’s famous “Fanatical Experience.” Braze’s CTO and cofounder Jon Hyman particularly appreciates the immediate support via Slack, with an average response time of just three minutes.

Pushing MongoDB past its limits

“ObjectRocket has partnered with Braze to push MongoDB up to and possibly past its limits,” says Hyman. Examples of that partnership include physical hardware changes, kernel tweaks, architectural changes, design assistance, application- and database-level design architecting, running a custom-patched MongoDB software version, indexing help and troubleshooting — plus upgrades to Braze’s massive environments. Hyman also cites what he calls ObjectRocket’s “battle-tested readiness” as a key characteristic of its successful partnership with Braze. Anything that Hyman can envision to change and scale its instances to accommodate new customers, ObjectRocket willingly jumps in to help make it work, testing and optimizing instances as they go. Braze has been able to keep its DBA headcount down while building and running a truly mind-bogglingly massive MongoDB installation, thanks to its complete trust in ObjectRocket’s support.

Rackspace's ObjectRocket now certified

Now there’s even more reason to check out Rackspace’s ObjectRocket portfolio offering: it’s now certified as a worldwide cloud provider of MongoDB. “Rackspace’s ObjectRocket portfolio offering has database administrators and engineers who fully support our data, not just the infrastructure, and have worked with us to customize solutions that optimize for our various customer needs, says Hyman. "We’re excited about their certification and partnership with MongoDB.”