Reimagining product culture: Scaling and migration on AWS with Smarsh (KUB203)

Reimagining Product Culture through a Large-Scale Migration to AWS

Who is Smarsh?

  • Smarsh is a leader in the Intelligence Communications Capture, Archive, and Surveillance market.
  • Their platform helps organizations remain compliant in a rapidly changing space.
  • Smarsh has over 6,500 customers, 70 petabytes of data under management, and manages billions of communications daily.

Why did Smarsh need to migrate to AWS?

  • The complexity of communication technologies within organizations makes compliance and management difficult.
  • Smarsh built the first unified, cloud-native platform designed for communications compliance.
  • The platform includes Capture, Enterprise Archive, Enterprise Conduct, and Enterprise Discovery products to help customers manage their communications.

The Migration Process

  • Smarsh decided to migrate from PCF and VMware to AWS native services to scale and innovate.
  • The migration was done in under 9 months, covering 400 unique deployments of various technologies.
  • The key focus areas were cost, high availability, and quality.
  • The migration started with PostgreSQL deployments and then expanded to 1,569 container deployments.

Balancing Scale and Resiliency through Observability

  • Smarsh rethought their observability approach to support the migration and handle the 70 petabytes of data under management.
  • They leveraged AWS services like Amazon Managed Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Keda, and Carpenter to improve observability.
  • This provided more data and insights, enabling better decision-making during the migration.

Enabling Product Teams

  • Smarsh reorganized the platform engineering team into three groups: Forge, Tooling, and Insights.
  • This empowered the product teams with data and autonomy to develop their roadmaps.
  • The introduction of Technical Product Managers helped bridge the gap between technical complexities and strategic product direction.
  • Dual-track Agile was adopted to focus on iterative value delivery.

Benefits to Customers

  • Customers experienced no downtime or slowdowns during the migration.
  • Smarsh could scale up to handle peak loads without manual intervention.
  • Observability improvements allowed them to quickly identify and resolve issues, such as a configuration update that caused a drop in ingestion rate.

The Future

  • Smarsh is exploring new AWS technologies, such as Amazon EMR, OpenSearch, and S3 Outposts, to continue innovating and serving their customers better.
  • They are hiring engineers to support their future plans and are actively participating in AWS re:Invent to stay up-to-date with the latest advancements.

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