Case Study: Formspring

Download the Formspring Case Study

“Cassandra has allowed us to build bigger features faster and more reliably, while using less money and without needing to expand our staff.” - Kyle Ambroff, Formspring

Company: Formspring

Overview: Launched in 2009, San Francisco based Formspring, which recently released its first native iOS application for mobile users, has more than 26 million registered members worldwide who provide more than 10 million responses daily. Formspring receives over 30 million unique visitors per month. “We have about 3.8 billion responses in our system,” says Ambroff. “That’s a lot of content.”

Formspring’s explosive growth is what prompted the company to explore other database solutions and ultimately, move to the elastically scalable and reliable Apache Cassandra™ platform. “We were initially using a mix of MySQL, Amazon SimpleDB, Redis and Memcached,” Ambroff recalls. (Formspring, which is hosted on Amazon’s ec2 infrastructure, had nearly 64 MySQL databases as of September 2011.)

Data Size: 3 clusters in production

Challenge: The need for a NoSQL database solution to support Formspring’s explosive growth and allow the social network to provide reliable service and new features to its users worldwide, efficiently store and easily access large amounts of data, and seamlessly syndicate content to large groups of users.

Solution: The open source, elastically scalable and reliable Apache Cassandra™ platform, which delivers significantly faster performance than other solutions, while reducing data storage costs and IT’s system management responsibilities.