Pipedrive expands globally through a strategic public cloud migration to AWS, improving efficiency and reach

As Pipedrive expanded globally, it recognized the need to evolve its infrastructure to better support its rapidly growing customer base and meet evolving performance demands.

“We undertook a significant project to rearchitect our infrastructure to operate across multiple data centers,” said Kristjan Elias, Director of Infrastructure at Pipedrive. “After careful evaluation, we shifted our strategy to smaller, distributed instances across multiple regions. This approach enabled us to scale more efficiently, maintain our infrastructure more effectively and mitigate risk while setting us up for long-term growth.”

The original technology strategy enabled Pipedrive to enhance scalability while delivering fast, reliable service to customers in various geographic regions. It also allowed the company to more effectively address compliance and regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

“As our operations expanded, some components of the infrastructure became more difficult to scale, especially to match the pace of growth,” added Vladimir Žulin-Tarelkin, Senior Infrastructure Architect at Pipedrive. Pipedrive needed a solution that would support its cloud-agnostic infrastructure strategy while also providing the flexibility and scalability necessary to meet global demands. At the same time, the company sought to optimize infrastructure costs and increase operational efficiency. Having already used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several initiatives, Pipedrive leaned on this experience when evaluating options for a broader migration.

Having trusted Rackspace Technology with its environments for more than a decade, Pipedrive once again tapped into Rackspace expertise for assistance with its migration from private cloud to a multi-region AWS infrastructure. Executed over nine months, the collaboration saw Pipedrive’s technical team lead the migration with Rackspace experts providing strategic guidance and financial optimization support.

Pipedrive conducted a pilot by establishing a single AWS region and migrating a subset of customers to test the new environment. This allowed a thorough evaluation of performance and scalability, ensuring the infrastructure could meet future growth demands.

The strategy centered on a phased approach, migrating one data center at a time. The team started with smaller, newer environments, progressively moving to larger, more complex ones. This process allowed Pipedrive to maintain uninterrupted service while optimizing the infrastructure.

Rackspace leveraged its expertise to negotiate an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) with AWS, securing cost efficiencies for Pipedrive. The Rackspace team implemented its Optimizer+ service and guided Pipedrive through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), maximizing cost savings and utilization of available credits and resources.

Pipedrive’s AWS environment now integrates a comprehensive suite of services, including Amazon EC2 for compute resources, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for storage, Amazon VPCs for networking, load balancers for traffic management and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage.

The migration established eight AWS regions, strategically located to better serve Pipedrive’s 100,000+ global customers. This expanded infrastructure footprint improved performance and enabled Pipedrive to meet varying compliance requirements across jurisdictions.

“We asked the Rackspace team for recommendations on how to manage the migration and associated financials, and we were pleased that everything came together successfully in the end,” said Elias. “I would say it was a very big success.”