Case Study: Attentive handles Black Friday scale with PlanetScale

Attentive can confidently handle a 10× increase in volume on Black Friday/Cyber Monday thanks to PlanetScale

Attentive, the SMS marketing platform, needed a database that could keep up with rapid growth and extreme Black Friday/Cyber Monday traffic spikes while meeting strict data SLAs. Their existing Postgres setup on AWS RDS was nearing its scaling limits, support was weak, and the team needed a solution that could handle 10× typical volume without rewriting application code.

Attentive migrated critical databases to PlanetScale, using its Vitess-powered managed horizontal sharding, unlimited connection pooling, and high availability to scale without operational headaches. The result was a smooth migration and a successful BFCM event: on a 32-shard cluster, Attentive sustained 180K QPS all day with peaks of 400K QPS, including an unexpected 120K QPS from an internal service, while meeting performance goals and reducing database-related distractions.

Attentive

Michael Ndubuisi

Engineer, Segmentation Team