Case Study: Conspire achieves a production-ready, scalable, resilient social networking backend in three months with Akka

Building a new product on Typesafe

Conspire, a TechStars startup that analyzes email to map and weight users’ networks, needed to replace a messy, lock-heavy multithreaded Java prototype with a production-ready backend—fast. The team set an ambitious goal to build a scalable, resilient social-networking backend in three months with just three developers, while keeping the frontend decoupled and minimizing operational risk.

They adopted the Typesafe Reactive Platform (Akka) and moved core services to Scala, designing a supervisor-managed cluster of three siloed services (IMAP processing, analytics, mailer) that persist JSON to Amazon S3. The result was a simple, fault-tolerant, and elastic architecture that they built in three months, easily scales by adding EC2 nodes, reduced complexity of the codebase, and delivered a production-quality backend with support from the Akka engineering team.

Conspire

Ryan Tanner

Software Engineer