By taking advantage of the on-demand elasticity of AWS, Change.org can develop new features more quickly. “Our data science team can iterate very quickly because of the elasticity of AWS,” says Ramesh. “For example, when we build recommendation engines, the computational demands vary greatly depending on the type of algorithm we used or how much data is involved. But we can do it all on the fly with AWS, using only the resources we need based on what we’re doing for that project. As a result, we’re not requisitioning servers or having to plan ahead.”

The organization can also rely on its Solano CI automated testing environment to reduce test time and roll out new features into production faster. Since switching to Solano CI, the organization has cut its average build time from one hour to 15 minutes via Solano CI’s auto-parallelization. “We can deploy more CI builds through each day, which ultimately means we can push more changes to the site on a daily basis,” says Ramesh. “We are delivering value faster to our end users because of Solano CI.” In addition, Change.org can identify defects faster because it can run more tests with Solano CI. He says, “By detecting defects more quickly, we can ensure higher-quality code and ultimately produce better features.”

Change.org also has the scalability it needs to support traffic spikes. “We can much more easily respond to traffic bursts on our website by using AWS,” says Ramesh. “As we see more traffic, new background servers automatically come online. And as the traffic subsides, those servers go offline again. It’s very dependable and fast. And because it doesn’t require manual intervention from our engineers, it doesn’t take an hour for us to spin up new resources. It’s instantaneous.”

Additionally, the Solano CI environment is designed to scale, so Change.org can better support increases in test build requirements. “Sometimes, when we’re about to release major features and we’re approaching a deadline, we will have an unusually high number of builds we need to run,” says Ramesh. “Solano CI scales to support those needs because it benefits from the scalability of AWS.”

And because its CI system is now based in the cloud, Change.org developers no longer need to spend their time on maintenance tasks. Solano CI intelligently and automatically optimizes tests, so Change.org developers do not have to manage a CI system, configure virtual machines, or make sure its CI nodes are functioning correctly. “Our developers don’t have to spend time worrying about maintaining our CI system,” says Ramesh. “They can rely on Solano CI to do everything, so they can instead focus on what they do best: building great tools for our website that bring the most value to our end users across the globe.”

Change.org plans to greatly expand its use of AWS once it completes its migration to the environment. “We are very excited about the fact that AWS has multiple regions and availability zones worldwide, which is something we didn’t have with our previous solution,” says Ramesh. “Being able to build out a website architecture that will enable us to respond to global traffic is going to be a huge advantage for us. We have grown a lot internationally over the past few years, and we will be able to accelerate that even more by using AWS. We will have more redundancy and resiliency for our global users, and that opens up a whole new world for us in terms of our future growth.”