Case Study
UpViral: a platform that scales with demand, and SSL for every customer domain
MarTech · AWS Architecture · Managed Operations
UpViral is a marketing platform whose customers build landing pages for their campaigns and publish them on their own domains. When a campaign works, traffic arrives all at once, and it arrives on a page that carries the customer’s name.
Cloudacio redesigned the platform on AWS so that it scales with that traffic, built the system that secures every customer domain with its own SSL certificate, and has operated the platform since.
The platform had stability problems. Its components had not been designed to grow independently, so a surge in one place could take the rest down with it. For a product whose whole purpose is to make campaigns spread, the busiest moments were the ones most likely to go wrong.
Custom domains added a second problem. Every customer who connects a domain needs a valid SSL certificate for it, issued without anyone at UpViral touching it and renewed before it expires. The standard way to serve certificates on AWS is the Application Load Balancer, and a load balancer has a hard limit on how many certificates it can hold. A platform where any customer can bring a domain passes that limit quickly.
And once the platform was rebuilt, somebody had to run it. UpViral wanted its own team on the product, with someone else accountable for uptime and security.
We redesigned the architecture to be elastic. Each component of the platform scales on its own with the demand it receives, so a campaign that takes off adds capacity where the load is and leaves the rest of the platform undisturbed.
For custom domains, we built a reverse proxy made for this job. It sits in front of the platform, obtains a certificate for each customer domain when it is connected, serves it, and renews it automatically. Because certificates live in the proxy and not on a load balancer, the number of domains UpViral can host is no longer set by an AWS quota.
Since then, Cloudacio has managed the platform and answers for its uptime and its security, with the same engineers who designed it.
UpViral runs on a platform where every component scales with demand. A customer’s campaign going viral is the product working, and the infrastructure treats it that way.
Customers connect their own domains and get HTTPS without a ticket or a wait, and certificates renew on their own. UpViral’s team builds the product, and uptime and security have an owner.
"Cloudacio rebuilt our platform so that every part of it scales with demand, and solved SSL for our customers’ custom domains with a proxy they built for us. They have run the platform ever since, and we count on them to keep it up and secure."Danny Calliari, VP of Product at UpViral