Case Study: Zync Up achieves real-time location services at scale with DataStax Enterprise

Zync Up Engage Users with Real-time Location Services at Scale with DataStax Enterprise

Zync Up is a location-centric mobile app that aims to replace multiple services used for coordinating nights out by combining messaging, place discovery, ride logistics, and real-time location sharing. Founder and CEO Aaron Benz built the backend and initially used MySQL, but faced the challenge of supporting per-second location updates and real-time location streaming for potentially millions of users — a workload that demands lightning-fast, denormalized reads rather than traditional SQL queries.

Zync Up moved to Apache Cassandra backed by DataStax Enterprise, denormalizing user location data by session so views are fast Gets instead of complex queries, and using DSE in-memory tables for the hot user table to avoid adding a separate cache. The result is a simpler, single-cluster stack that handles high-frequency location updates at scale, delivers real-time sharing performance, and reduces operational complexity.

Zync Up

Aaron Benz

Founder and Chief Executive Officer