CEO Discusses Importance of Scalability in the Cloud

Can cloud computing help you lose weight? Lose It!, a small technology company in Boston, thinks so, which is why it has leveraged the Java cloud platform from CloudBees for deploying its latest weight-loss app. And although technology alone may not be enough to ensure that users shed pounds, this deal nonetheless represents a prime example of one of the key strengths of the cloud–scalability–in a very real-world setting.

Improving fitness is a popular ambition in January, when millions of people remain hopefully committed to budding New Year’s resolutions. For that reason, Lose It!’s weight-loss app experiences particularly heavy load at this time of the year, to the tune of up to 25,000 transactions per minute. An easily scalable cloud platform is the obvious solution for providing the technical resources necessary to handle that activity.

Lose It’s decision to work with CloudBees in particular was motivated by several factors. In general, the platform’s rapid application deployment and a cost schedule based on usage were all attractive factors. But one of the key selling points of CloudBees was its support for Java, on which Lose It! is based. Since developing with Java, as Lose It! CEO Charles Teague put it in an interview, was “little bit of a retro decision,” finding a cloud platform that would work well with Lose It!’s app presented some particular challenges that CloudBees was able to answer.

In addition, according to Teague, flexibility was vital in selecting a cloud platform, since Lose It!, a small startup, had no idea how many users to expect when it launched its app. Before it went live, he said, “we had no idea what scale we need to handle.” The company chose CloudBees because of its wide scalability, and so far has been pleased with the platform’s ability to handle the challenges of a large user base that now totals 13 million downloads overall of the Lose It! app, and several million currently active users.

Last but not least, Teague added that CloudBees makes application deployment particularly easy, simplifying the process of rolling out updates to Lose It!. It also offers real-time performance analysis tools via the New Relic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

The popularity of weight-loss apps like Lose It!–which is available for the Web, iOS and Android–may ebb and flow with the seasons. But demand for scalable cloud-computing–including platforms that support more traditional frameworks such as Java–is a constant, and CloudBees’s approach provides a solid example of the way Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers can leverage the flexibility of virtual servers to supply customers with solutions elastic enough to handle even the fickleness of end-users’ commitment to keeping fit.