Case Study: Banjo achieves 5x user growth and elastic, cost-effective scaling with Amazon Web Services

Banjo - Customer Case Study

Banjo is a real-time mobile app that aggregates social networks to show what's happening anywhere in the world. Rapid user growth strained its third-party back-end hosting, and the company needed more control, flexibility, and a platform that would let engineers experiment without the capital costs of running their own data center.

Banjo moved its back end to AWS while keeping a Heroku front end, using EC2 for compute and S3/Glacier for backups to support large MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres clusters and a growing fleet of instances. The change enabled rapid scaling and cost control—users grew from 1 million to 5.2 million in a year, the team handled 500–1,000% session spikes and 100,000 downloads over SXSW without downtime, and Banjo reduced infrastructure overhead so a small team could manage operations and continue innovating.

Banjo

Jeff Lee

Senior DevOps Engineer