How Airheart scaled to 500,000 travelers globally in less than 6 months with Stellate

Check out how we helped Airheart scale very quickly while keeping their performance fast. Or just go ahead and give the Stellate Edge Cache a try. Or do both!

Traveling with friends can be a whole heap of fun, but planning the itinerary can be a bit of a circus. Plunk down pandemic restrictions into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a real clown chase!

Airheart offers a tool designed specifically for collaboratively planning group travel itineraries. They launched their product in May 2021, during the height of the Corona pandemic, attracting almost immediately more than 80,000 users. Airheart needed to scale quickly to be able to sustain their rapid growth while keeping costs as low as possible.

Step right up, folks, and feast your eyes on Airheart’s architecture to understand how Stellate helped them scale all the way to the Big Top!

How Airheart builds a 50,000+ page website

Airheart's website consists of 50,000+ pages showing the latest travel regulations worldwide. The pages are rendered using React & Next.js, which grabs the data from a unified GraphQL API.

With a launch that was like blasting a buffoon from a cannon, Airheart’s explosive new start caused them to realize that their origin couldn't handle the load. The majority of their database queries are quite complex, involving nested data and subquery joins, but the results are the same for every user. In theory, an ideal situation to leverage caching as a way to reduce load.

Due to the ongoing, nail-biting global pandemic, travel regulations across different countries are changing constantly, if not by the day. Like Harry Houdini hoping to dazzle his audience, showing their users outdated information was a nightmare scenario that Airheart couldn’t allow. 

Scaling quickly while keeping costs low with GraphQL edge caching

The Stellate Edge Cache reduced Airheart's overall origin traffic by more than 65%, with some of the most complex queries reaching cache hit rates of up to 97%. This alleviates a lot of pressure from their Google Cloud SQL database, which is the most expensive part of their setup.

That, in turn, reduces Airheart's overall infrastructure costs by about 40% and helps them avoid the common problem of cold starts timing out during traffic spikes with Google Cloud Run. Finally, the Stellate Edge Cache also provides their 500,000+ users worldwide with super fast 50ms response times, no matter where they're currently traveling.

Stellate's GraphQL edge cache, with its instant worldwide purging, was the perfect solution to enable Airheart to add caching to their stack while ensuring their users always see the latest information.