Case Study: Dark Sky achieves scalable, low-maintenance handling of 8 million daily API requests with Linode

Dark Sky - Customer Case Study

Dark Sky, creators of the minute-by-minute Forecast.io API and popular iOS weather app, faced rapid user growth and sudden traffic spikes that strained their infrastructure — their API now serves about 8 million forecasts per day and Forecast.io receives roughly 200,000 page views daily. Early scaling limits and time-consuming troubleshooting risked pulling the founders away from product and business work.

They moved to Linode’s cloud, deploying NodeBalancer for managed load balancing and Longview for monitoring, with fast setup and responsive support (NodeBalancer installed in under 30 minutes; Longview pinpointed a bug in five minutes). The result was reliable scaling across 60+ VMs, smoother handling of peak traffic, reduced backend maintenance, and continued user growth.

Dark Sky

Jason LaPorte

Dark Sky