Case Study: iRobot achieves seamless scaling of a 20x Christmas traffic spike with AWS IoT

The Spikiest Time of the Year Is No Problem for iRobot and AWS IoT

iRobot, the maker of Roomba robot vacuums, faces massive simultaneous device activations on Christmas Day that create huge traffic spikes for its cloud backend. To handle this, iRobot runs its customer-facing iRobot HOME app and its robots’ IoT backend on a serverless architecture built around AWS IoT—using AWS IoT Core (device shadows and messaging), AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Using AWS IoT, iRobot’s Roombas connect securely to the cloud, share state via device shadows, route API calls through API Gateway to Lambda, and stream telemetry into Kinesis with DynamoDB storing associations. That architecture absorbed a 20x traffic spike on Christmas with a response team in the single digits—iRobot only needed to add Kinesis shards—making the spike a non-event and freeing the company to focus on shipping rather than scaling, demonstrating measurable operational and staffing benefits from AWS IoT.

iRobot

Ben Kehoe

Cloud Robotics Research Scientist