Case Study: Bustle achieves serverless scale, 84% cost savings, and halved engineering team size with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Bustle - Customer Case Study

Bustle is a Brooklyn‑based digital publisher (Bustle.com and Romper.com) read by about 50 million people monthly. Facing a monolithic app that struggled to scale after moving from a third‑party PaaS to OpsWorks, the team spent significant time on server management, automation, and monitoring—raising the barrier for new engineers and preventing them from focusing on front‑end features and product work.

Bustle moved core workloads to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, and API Gateway (with a self‑managed Redis store), rebuilt Romper.com on this backend, and created an internal Lambda/API Gateway deployment tool. The shift enabled real‑time metrics for data‑driven decisions, eliminated infrastructure management, cut engineering headcount roughly in half, and delivered about 84% cost savings.

Bustle

Tyler Love

Chief Technology Officer