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Saambaa Case Study: Scaling 50 Million Daily Requests with Build
How Saambaa scaled to 50 million daily requests and accelerated product development by moving to Build.
How Saambaa scaled 50 million daily requests and accelerated product development with Build
Saambaa at a glance
- Product: Hyper-local content platform for major publishers
- Traffic: 50 million requests per day
- Peak load: ~1,000 requests/sec
Key Outcomes
- Modern CI/CD workflow introduced, replacing custom VM-based deployment processes
- Self-healing infrastructure supporting millions of daily requests and ~1,000 requests/sec
- Engineering time freed to focus product development resulting in growth accelerating products built and launched rapidly
- Direct access to Build engineers, enabling better deployment practices and operational improvements
The Company
Saambaa powers hyper-local events, news, and advertising platforms used by major publishers. Their system delivers real-time content and targeted experiences across a network of media partners.
The platform processes tens of millions of requests every day, often exceeding ~1,000 requests per second during peak traffic.
As the platform grew, the infrastructure supporting it struggled to keep pace. A growing portion of engineering time was spent maintaining and stabilizing the environment instead of building new capabilities for the product itself.
The team reached a breaking point: infrastructure needed to get out of the way so they could focus on shipping product.
The Opportunity
Saambaa began looking for a way to modernize their deployment workflow and remove the DevOps drag that came with their previous infrastructure.
Their environment relied on virtual machines, load balancers, and custom deployment processes. While functional, it was brittle and required constant attention from the engineering team.
What Saambaa needed wasn't just a new infrastructure provider. They needed a platform that would transform how their team shipped software.
The Solution
Build offered Saambaa a modern development workflow with the capacity to handle their scale.
Build replaces machine-centric infrastructure with dyno fleets that automatically scale, monitor themselves, and self-heal. Instead of individual servers becoming critical points of failure, applications run across a coordinated system designed to maintain availability automatically.
Once live, Saambaa transitioned to a modern Git-based deployment pipeline:
- Developers push code to GitHub
- Continuous integration runs automated tests
- Successful builds deploy automatically to staging
- Releases are promoted to production after validation
The result was a workflow that felt simple, predictable, and dramatically easier to operate, freeing the team from worrying about infrastructure and allowing them to focus on delivering value to customers.
The Impact
The biggest impact wasn't just improved stability. It was what the Saambaa team could do with the time they got back.
With infrastructure running quietly in the background, engineers could focus on improving the platform itself.
Since moving to Build, Saambaa has launched several initiatives accelerating the growth of their business, including:
- New geographic products
- AI-powered platform capabilities
- Additional tools for publisher partners
Projects previously deprioritized due to infrastructure maintenance were rapidly developed and shipped to customers.
Since moving off their previous infrastructure, Saambaa has experienced zero downtime, giving the team significant peace of mind. The Build team has also worked closely with Saambaa to recommend architectural improvements and operational best practices, ensuring the platform continues to evolve alongside the company's growing product ambitions.
The shift was simple but powerful: instead of maintenance, the team could build.
Support from Engineers, Not Support Queues
Another meaningful difference has been the level of support provided by the Build team.
Rather than interacting with traditional support queues, Saambaa works directly with Build engineers who understand the platform deeply.
The teams regularly connect to review deployment strategies, infrastructure changes, and operational improvements. These conversations have helped the Saambaa team refine their processes and adopt modern best practices without increasing operational workload.
For a team running a high-traffic platform, direct access to engineers has proven to be a major advantage.
Built to Scale
Today, Saambaa's platform runs on infrastructure designed to scale with their growth.
Applications run across fleets of dynos that distribute load, recover from failures, and scale capacity as traffic increases. When demand grows, the team can increase capacity directly through the Build interface instead of provisioning new servers.
For a platform serving millions of requests per day, that level of operational simplicity has become a major advantage.
Looking Forward
Build now powers a core part of Saambaa's platform.
What once required constant operational attention now runs quietly in the background, allowing the engineering team to focus on building products for publishers and expanding the platform.
With infrastructure no longer slowing them down, the Saambaa team can move faster than ever.