Case Study: Hannon Hill achieves scalable, cost-efficient serverless live content delivery for Clive with Fauna

Clive - Hannon Hill Engagement Tool Built with Fauna

Hannon Hill, maker of the Cascade CMS, built Clive — a digital engagement and personalization tool — which needed to serve live content directly to website visitors at scale. Because Clive’s Live API could face millions of requests and a single machine wouldn’t suffice, Hannon Hill adopted a serverless stack using AWS Lambda and Fauna to avoid manual load balancing and database/server scaling.

Using Fauna as the live-data store (with PostgreSQL retained for admin data), Hannon Hill implemented an AWS Lambda + API Gateway Live API and a Rails-based admin that pushes content into Fauna. Fauna enabled auto-scaling across 5k–50k requests per hour (average ~30k), fast querying of millions of records with cursor-based pagination, and reliable transactional behavior without MySQL-style locking problems. The result: major DevOps time savings (vs. ~10 hours/month on legacy servers), smoother performance under heavy load, and lower infrastructure costs (≈$0.135/hr for the serverless path vs. ~$0.63/hr for the legacy stack), all achieved with Fauna.

Hannon Hill