Sydney-based marketplace start-up Airtasker has doubled down on the cloud, picking Rackspace to handle its migration to Amazon Web Services.
The move, carried out under the guidance of new CTO Paul Keen, comes as Airtasker tackles a massive spike in traffic.
Company CEO Tim Fung told The Australian that Mr Keen, former tech chief at Dick Smith, brought with him a really strong skill set and an understanding the tech stack required.
“He was able to maintain a big picture view of Airtasker’s company objectives and at the same time be able to work directly with each of our engineers,” Mr Fung said.
According to Mr Fung, the company’s east coast launch of its ‘like a boss’ campaign saw app downloads spike, with traffic increasing by up to 1100 per cent, and the app trending in the App Store.
Airtasker helps facilitate 80,000 tasks per month across Australia, with 1 million community members. It is used for everything from cooking, cleaning and decorating jobs, through to niche tasks such as setting up a Game of Thrones party for the season finale.
“Before we transitioned our infrastructure to Rackspace, we were genuinely fearful of crazy traffic spikes, mainly caused by media exposure, as we would often suffer major performance issues and actually once went down completely,” he said.
“If there’s one thing critical for a start-up — it’s being able to make sure that you can serve your users to absorb growth opportunities. With our new Rackspace infrastructure setup, we can be confident of that.”
Mr Fung said his start-up had grown six times year-on-year in 2016, and was aiming to keep up this growth.
“We’ll have a major emphasis on both top line growth initiatives as well as continual iteration of our product with an emphasis on driving quality individual interactions within the marketplace,” he said.
Mr Keen said as the company grows, robustness and scalability of the underlying technology becomes critical.
“One of the most important aspects of selecting to work with Rackspace and their managed AWS team was to make sure the business was never restricted because of our technical capabilities,” he said.
“As a result, we can better handle spikes in workloads, are more elastic in our scaling and can predict the number of servers we need before large events. For example, we can go down to eight servers during quiet periods, and scale out to 30 or 40 within 5-10 minutes when we need them — this makes us vastly more cost-effective than we were before.”
Airtasker has also ramped up its use of Dropbox, implementing the US collaboration giant’s newest tool Paper.
“We’ve been using Dropbox for quite a while, at first we were all just using it personally,” Airtasker co-founder Jonathan Lui told The Australian. “Those were the days of when you’d get 500 megabytes personally, and refer someone and get another 50 megabytes extra.
“It was much smaller numbers back then. As the storage grew we started using it in the business.”
Mr Lui said the company used Dropbox in the early days for its investment rounds, creating shared folders it would share with potential investors who were meeting the company and doing due diligence.
“We eventually upgraded to a business account, which obviously gives you a lot more storage and we started using it for our backups,” he said. “
“Now we’ve started using Dropbox Paper for our meetings, documenting some of these decisions we’re making and using it to guide the agenda.”
Dropbox Australia boss Charlie Wood said Dropbox Paper is slowly replacing email for his team.
“Email’s not my communication repository for a lot of things these days,” he said. “I shift over to Paper and search through that, it means I can search all my documents in that one environment.
“It’s also way more fun communicating in there than through an email thread.”
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