The cloud stack that helped SendGrid scale to 100 billion emails sent

SendGrid is built for developers by developers. We’re in the business of making email easy for developers so they can concentrate on their core business. With 20% of commercial email never making it to the inbox, companies are losing valuable revenue, engagement, and brand advocacy from their customers. At SendGrid, we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. And there’s no better place for us to do that than in the cloud.

As a company grows and becomes more successful, the more critical email becomes to drive additional growth and to reach new and existing subscribers. But with increased usage comes new challenges in maintenance, delivery, and scalability. This can make email a very resource-intensive operation that strains development resources. SendGrid helps relieve companies of the cost, complexities, and associated redundancies inherent with on-premise email management.

Our infrastructure is hosted with five different cloud providers (Limestone, Steadfast, AWS, Rackspace, Softlayer), which allows for failover and minimizes the risk of widespread outages or security breaches. We also have our own self-hosted datacenter in Equinix for greater control and scalability. In the past we used both Cassandra and HBase, but we now use sharded MySQL to scale to the billions of transactions we currently handle every month. In 2009, SendGrid started with 1,000 customers and today we have over 100,000 customers who together have sent over 100 billion emails.