

Together, the Connected Fitness apps emit millions of event messages per hour via the Apache Kafka distributed message system and persist hundreds of terabytes of data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Additionally, the organization is using Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse for Connected Fitness user data in combination with other partners. More than 180 million global Connected Fitness users authenticate using a cross-region architecture built using Amazon DynamoDB. The company also uses Auto Scaling to automatically scale up its Amazon EC2 capacity to maintain performance during spikes in app use and decrease capacity during lower usage periods. The Connected Fitness platform now runs on nearly two thousand Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. It’s also continuously creating new services, and that’s important for us because we are an innovation company.” “AWS is the biggest player in the market and more experienced than anyone else. “MyFitnessPal and Endomondo were already running on AWS, and we wanted to have the entire Connected Fitness platform on AWS,” says Demmel. If systems are down, that impacts people who are trying to improve their health and fitness worldwide."Īfter deciding that a cloud solution would be the best fit for its elasticity and reliability requirements, Under Armour chose to move its MapMyFitness and UA Record apps to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “Given the size of our user base, that was not good for our brand. “We had two data centers, and if there were any problems in our primary data center, we had outages,” says Demmel.

The organization also sought more reliability and high availability for the Connected Fitness platform. “Managing and optimizing that cyclical traffic in a data center was challenging in terms of spinning up compute resources quickly.” “We see at least twice as much app traffic on weekends and early in the work week,” says Demmel. And all the apps see more traffic on weekends.

Some of the company’s other apps experience usage spikes in the summer season. For example, the MyFitnessPal nutrition tracking app sees a spike in new users on New Year’s Day. Under Armour also sought the elasticity to support cyclical app usage. “We wanted to be more dynamic and focus more on our growth instead of optimizing our data center footprint,” says Jesse Demmel, vice president of platform engineering for Under Armour Connected Fitness. However, the company struggled to manage that growth while relying on an IT hosting provider. The Under Armour Connected Fitness platform is in high-growth mode, with more people using its suite of fitness apps every day.
