Case Study: American Red Cross achieves resilient, scalable online donor services with Rackspace Technology

How The American Red Cross’ IT Infrastructure Helps Save Lives

The American Red Cross supplies about 40% of the U.S. blood supply, and because donations are time‑sensitive it must keep its donor sites highly available. After its prior web commerce relationship ended, the organization faced the risk of downtime and deployment complexity from a monolithic Java EAR architecture—problems that could deter donors and hamper disaster response during traffic surges.

Rackspace rebuilt the Red Cross web infrastructure with a microservices architecture and autoscaling hosting for Redcross.org and Redcrossblood.org, enabling faster, independent deployments and handling large traffic spikes. Within months CPU and memory use dropped, release management became more nimble, and the Red Cross reported no outages during Hurricanes Florence and Michael or recent wildfires; upcoming improvements include a blood drive coordinator portal and enhanced site search.

American Red Cross

Matt Cascio

Executive Director, Enterprise Web Systems