Case Study: Rachio achieves 40% faster time-to-market and secure, scalable IoT with Amazon Web Services

Rachio - Customer Case Study

Rachio, a Colorado startup maker of the Wi‑Fi Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller, helps homeowners optimize watering schedules by consulting local weather, soil, and plant data across up to 16 zones to conserve water without under‑watering. As a small team in 2012, Rachio needed to get to market quickly while avoiding heavy investment in hardware and infrastructure, building secure device certificate management, and handling large, bursty demand at peak watering times.

Rachio built its back end on AWS—using AWS IoT (instead of its own HiveMQ broker), Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elasticsearch Service and the Alexa Skills Kit—to gain security, high availability and automatic scalability. The move let the company launch 40% faster, cut development costs by about 40% through built‑in security and certificate management, handle millions of daily device messages, and deploy APIs and e‑commerce quickly without a large infrastructure team.

Rachio

Franz Garsombke

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder