Case Study: Soulpicks improves serverless performance and cuts cold starts with Thundra

Thundra helps Soulpicks to keep a great overview of their AWS Serverless environment

Soulpicks, an Amsterdam-based social media startup founded in 2018, built its app on a fully serverless AWS stack and needed better visibility into system health, performance, and incident root causes. As traffic grew, the team wanted a way to quickly spot bottlenecks, monitor cold starts and errors, and troubleshoot issues across services like API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Elasticsearch. They chose Thundra for monitoring and observability.

With Thundra, Soulpicks gained detailed tracing, logging, invocation tagging, and distributed tracing to quickly identify slow Java methods, resource bottlenecks, and customer-specific issues. Thundra’s stat-aware warm-up solution also helped reduce cold starts by 80%, while giving the team a clearer overview of Lambda performance, errors, and costs.

Soulpicks

Elmer van den Heuvel

Cloud Architect & Chief Technology Officer