Case Study: Morningstar achieves serverless speed and instant operational visibility with New Relic

Morningstar.com has 0 outages in first year of re-platforming

Morningstar, the Chicago-based investment research firm founded in 1984, relied on Morningstar.com as its customer-facing portal but faced frequent outages, poor scalability, limited visibility into performance, and slow product launches. In 2018 the site team was tasked with rebuilding the platform in seven months to achieve “extreme speed and extreme stability” while integrating with a layered legacy stack.

They re‑platformed to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, and a CI/CD pipeline, and instrumented the system with New Relic for end-to-end observability. The result: near‑elimination of downtime (zero major outages in eight months), dramatically faster deployments (Dev to production candidate in ~20 minutes), safer releases (deploying at 5 p.m. with no rollbacks), quicker root‑cause detection, and more developer time focused on product features.

Morningstar

Zach Erdmann

Senior Software Engineer