Digital media / sportsSourced

Case Study: Barstool Sports eliminates outages and saves 20-30% migrating from Amazon Aurora to PlanetScale

Barstool Sports Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk

Key facts · TL;DR

Company

Barstool Sports

Industry

Digital media / sports

Challenge

Amazon Aurora couldn't keep up with a serverless architecture, causing costly outages.

Headline result

15-minute cutover, 20-30% cost savings, and the end of Amazon Aurora outages that had cost up to $2 million each

Key results

20-30%

Cost savings

vs Amazon Aurora

15 min

Cutover time

single branch merge

$2M

Outage cost eliminated

single Aurora outage

The challenge

Barstool Sports ran on Amazon Aurora Serverless, which struggled with the demands of its serverless architecture. Its Lambda functions scaled thousands of containers per second, but adding Aurora read replicas took 3-4 minutes and was expensive. Outages were frequent and costly — one lasted 45 minutes and one cost the company an estimated $2 million — and the team had no dedicated DevOps experts.

The solution

Barstool migrated to PlanetScale, which runs MySQL, allowing the team to switch quickly by merging a single branch that changed the connection string and a few drivers. PlanetScale handled automatic scaling, connection pooling and query collapsing without requiring DevOps expertise.

“In the end, we saved 20-30% by switching to PlanetScale.”
AB
Andrew Barba
Engineering Lead, Barstool Sports

The results, in context

Barstool completed the cutover in about 15 minutes and reports saving 20-30% by switching to PlanetScale, savings it says it did not anticipate. After migrating, the team eliminated the Amazon Aurora outages — one of which had cost around $2 million — and went months without database issues.

Products used

PlanetScale PlanetScale (MySQL)