Echelon Fitness Achieves Elastic Scaling to Meet 1,000% Annual Growth on AWS
Echelon’s state-of-the-art exercise equipment sales and on-demand studio fitness classes saw exponential growth as its user base grew 1,000% year over year from 2019. Echelon needed to reduce costs while improving performance and security for millions of global users.
Industry
Consumer Goods, Retail
Challenge
Echelon’s state-of-the-art exercise equipment sales and on-demand studio fitness classes saw exponential growth as its user base grew 1,000% year over year from 2019. Echelon needed to reduce costs while improving performance and security for millions of global users.
Solutions Applications, Application Modernization, Security, Security Operations, Security Strategy Platforms Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS)Our customer
Echelon Fitness provides state-of-the-art exercise equipment through which users in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom access live, on-demand, studio-quality workouts.
“We knew that by using AWS, we could maintain a quality user experience even if we grew exponentially. AWS enables small companies like ours to enjoy a backend system of the same quality that billion-dollar companies have.”
How we helped
Echelon Fitness launched its full streaming solution and iOS and Android apps in three months. “Without AWS, we wouldn’t have been able to grow as fast and as reliably as we have,” said John Santo, Chief Technology Officer at Echelon. “It doesn’t take long to add modalities to our system.”
The Echelon Fitness user base grew 1,000% year over year from 2019. As the company expanded, it had to meet regional security regulations. Its live stream video delivery had to handle high demand, yet the fitness video streams crashed even with just 1,200 attendees.
To scale and increase security, Echelon teamed up with cloud-native services provider Rackspace. “We provide advice, direction and hands-on delivery so organizations become more efficient,” said Jeremy Bendat, Vice President of Business Development and Partnerships at Rackspace. “We were able to correct the scaling issue and introduce savings opportunities as well.” Echelon saved $25,000 per month through optimizations identified by Rackspace.
Echelon Fitness uses automatic scaling groups through AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a simple-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. In December 2020, the company hosted over two million fitness classes, compared to 800,000 classes in 2019. It went from offering four live classes a day to between 20 and 50 classes each day.
These live classes were distributed globally using Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications and APIs to users globally, with low latency and high transfer speeds — all within a developer-friendly environment. Now Echelon's virtual classes can handle 10,000 or more attendees without issue.
Rackspace aided Echelon in implementing a disaster recovery plan using Amazon S3 Glacier, a secure, durable and low-cost cloud storage for data archiving and long-term backup. Amazon S3 Glacier enables automated, encrypted, restorable backups and a lifecycle plan that places older data in cold storage. “The system separates our data storage, so our customers’ fitness data is safe,” said Santo.
“We provide advice, direction, and hands-on delivery so organizations become more efficient. We were able to correct the scaling issue and introduce savings opportunities as well.”
What we achieved together
Echelon Fitness was able to reduce costs and improve performance and security for millions of its global users. Echelon Fitness opened new headquarters and a technology facility, where it plans to build a studio for class creation. In 2021, the company received funding from Goldman Sachs to help further its users’ experience, and Echelon launched a new leaderboard with enhanced interactive features based on customer feedback in March.
Echelon continues to work with Rackspace to integrate AWS machine learning services into its live stream network to gain user insights and build a recommendation engine that can suggest new content and classes to users based on their previous selections. Rackspace is also helping Echelon improve the service by adding subtitle information to videos and streams.
With the help of Rackspace and AWS, Echelon has expanded exponentially and cut costs while providing a global interactive community fitness experience. “We can take on more work,” said Santo. “Our customers see more features and know we’re listening to them. That’s important for our company’s trajectory.”
After their transformation, Echelon was able to host over two million classes, compared to 800,000 classes in 2019, and went from offering four live classes a day to between 20 and 50 classes each day.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a hybrid, multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across AI, applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimizing returns into the future.
As a global hybrid, multicloud technology services pioneer, we deliver innovative capabilities to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and create incredible experiences. Named a best place to work, year after year according to Fortune, Forbes and Glassdoor, we attract and develop world-class talent to deliver the best expertise to our customers. Everything we do is wrapped in Fanatical Experience® — our obsession with customer success that drives us to help each customer work faster, smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
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