Case Study: New Relic achieves rapid platform scaling and 20x faster developer setup with Docker

New Relic Scales Their Software Platform Quickly with Docker and Creates New Tools Designed For Dockerized Applications

New Relic, a SaaS application-performance company, needed to quickly scale infrastructure and move from monolithic apps to a service-oriented architecture to support new products like New Relic Insights and increase daily deployments without disrupting customers. The challenge was managing the explosion of microservice data and the operational complexity of rapidly scaling and releasing many small services.

The team adopted Docker, built an open-source deployment tool (Centurion), and created a Docker-based release pipeline. Today 75+ production services run on Docker across New Relic’s data centers and AWS, developer setup time fell dramatically (often from a day to about an hour), hundreds of engineers can deploy on demand, operations overhead dropped, and New Relic added Docker-aware monitoring that links hosts, images, and application processes to speed troubleshooting and restore service levels.

New Relic

Sean Kane

Lead Site Reliability Engineer