Case Study: Remind achieves 50% lower 99th-percentile response times with Amazon Web Services

Remind - Customer Case Study

Remind is a web and mobile app that helps teachers send texts to students and communicate with parents, serving 25 million users (including 1.5 million teachers) and delivering about 150 million messages per month. The company had been running a monolithic app on a third‑party PaaS but faced scaling limits and poor visibility into CPU, memory, and network performance; an attempted in‑house PaaS on CoreOS (fleet/etcd) proved unstable and the small engineering team did not want to operate its own cluster manager.

Remind moved to AWS and built an open‑source PaaS called Empire on Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), using ELB for service discovery and a Heroku‑compatible API/CLI for developer ease. The shift to managed ECS improved operational efficiency and visibility, delivered better stability and lower latency, and halved 99th‑percentile response times (2× improvement) with less variance and fewer spikes, while retaining security and routing control via VPCs.

Remind

Jason Fischl

VP of Engineering