Case Study: Lynx Grills Inc achieves a CES Innovation Award and rapid, scalable SmartGrill app delivery with Heroku

Lynx Builds Their SmartGrill on Heroku Platform, Wins Innovation Award at CES 2015

Lynx Grills, a Southern California maker of premium outdoor cooking appliances, set out to create the SmartGrill — a voice-operated, fully connected grill that syncs recipes, controls multiple cooking zones, and notifies users via mobile. The company needed a reliable, scalable cloud backend and a fast development cycle to deliver a polished mobile app and real-time features, and found their initial Microsoft Azure approach added unwanted DevOps overhead and performance limitations.

Working with partner Ethos Solutions, Lynx moved its server-side stack to Heroku and delivered the backend in three weeks with a small team. Using Java/Play, Heroku Postgres (with PG Backups), RabbitMQ, S3 and Xamarin for the clients, the team gained faster deployments, zero-downtime rollouts, easy scaling and reduced ops burden — enabling a richer app experience, quicker feature delivery and improved reliability, and helping the SmartGrill win a CES 2015 Innovation Award.

Lynx Grills Inc

Jim Buch

CEO, Lynx Grills Inc