RunSignUp Reliability Update

We have recently done a number of upgrades to our infrastructure to try to improve our service.  As discussed in an earlier blog, we are trying to be transparent on how we operate.

One of the biggest things that worries us about providing our service is what happens if it goes down when our customers need us.  Runners are now signing up on our site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Race Directors are adding races, making changes, getting Participant Reports all of the time.  You are putting your trust in us to be there when you need us.

As we have talked about in the past, we are built on the largest and most advanced Cloud infrastructure available – Amazon Web Services.  We recently upgraded our database to use the Amazon RDS Multi-zone configuration.  This basically keeps an exact, up-to-date copy of our database in a separate Amazon data center.  This means if our main database goes down for any reason, there is a complete and functioning backup that should allow continuous operation of our service.

We did this upgrade earlier this week.  We are happy to report that the process took less than 8 minutes, and there was ZERO DOWNTIME for our overall service.  Not a single runner signing up for a race was affected, and there were ZERO ERRORS reported in our New Relic monitoring system.

We have a number of design elements meant to try to eliminate single points of failure.  See the RunSignUp Infrastructure for a diagram or how we configure multiple web server and load balancers in multiple data centers.

We can’t promise we will be always available, but it is safe to say that we have the most redundant system of any registration company you can chose to use.  We will keep working hard to make sure we keep improving.