eHarmony Scales Up in the Cloud to Meet Demand

Business Situation

eHarmony needed to keep up with the rapidly changing business and technology demands of their growing business. eHarmony often saw spikes in their application and website usage based on seasonality and promotions.  Their existing data center struggled to handle these spikes and they were reluctant to add capacity that would have sat idle for a portion of the time. To scale flexibly, they turned to the Google Cloud Platform and Maven Wave.  Specifically, the company wanted to understand the potential benefits of moving their applications to a containerized Kubernetes environment in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP, including Kubernetes and a continuous improvement and continuous deployment pipeline, provides the ability to scale the application to meet online demand and to enhance the application to meet evolving needs.

Solution

Maven Wave developed a CI/CD pipeline to support the migration of eHarmony’s matching engine. This project demonstrated the ease of running an application in the cloud, but also GCP’s ability to rapidly deploy both GKE Infrastructure and application code in a CI/CD pipeline. With Maven Wave’s help, eHarmony was able to migrate their production matching applications to the cloud ahead of schedule.

Results

The move to GCP allowed eHarmony to introduce new applications and features much more quickly and the ability to meet evolving customer demands. The project demonstrated the ease and value of CI/CD for both infrastructure and application deployment, and the ease of implementing applications in Kubernetes.  eHarmony had originally intended to run just a proof of concept of their matching engine on GCP. However, the POC was so successful, that they migrated the GCP installation to production and scaled it to support their entire user base.