Case Study: Bleacher Report achieves zero-downtime RDS performance self-tuning with HashiCorp Consul

RDS performance self-tuning with Consul at Bleacher Report

Bleacher Report, the sports media company and second-largest sports website, needed a better way to manage Amazon RDS read replicas as traffic shifted between its web and mobile app experiences. As demand grew and replica limits were reached on AWS, the team needed a scalable, low-downtime approach to keep database performance aligned with changing user load.

Using HashiCorp Consul, Bleacher Report stored replica information in a centralized service registry and dynamically rebalanced RDS replicas between frontend and API workloads as traffic patterns changed. HashiCorp Consul enabled automatic, no-downtime configuration updates through HAProxy and Consul Template, improved performance tuning, and helped the team treat replicas as immutable infrastructure components, reducing manual intervention and allowing lagging replicas to be replaced automatically.

Bleacher Report

Benson Wu

DevOps Manager