Mint is part of Intuit’s multi-year journey to move its hosting strategy to the public cloud. Mint also uses AWS CloudFormation templates, which give the company’s administrators a way to provision and manage its AWS resources easily, and employs Amazon CloudFront, a global content-delivery network (CDN) service designed to speed the delivery of websites and other web assets, to deliver its content.
“Part of the reason for migrating was that we knew we wouldn’t have to tune database IOPS anymore, and we also saw we could reduce some operating costs,” McCluskey says. As part of this optimization effort, the company migrated its MySQL instances from Amazon EC2 to Amazon RDS for MySQL. Approximately one year later, the company shut down the data center it had previously used to host and shifted its focus to optimizing its applications on AWS. Mint initially migrated more than 100 MySQL instances to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). In addition, AWS’ security posture gave us a lot of confidence,” McCluskey says.
“We saw that moving to AWS would give us a more highly available architecture at a better price. Mint considered hosting its service in an internal private cloud, but instead chose to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We needed a cloud company that provided strong security capabilities.” “Given that we’re managing financial data, security is of paramount importance. “It made sense to migrate to the cloud, but we had to make sure we found the right cloud provider,” McCluskey says. Moving to the cloud would help solve some of these challenges. We wanted to focus more on delivering exceptional financial-management products and less on managing the backend IT environment.” “Our business is helping people improve their financial lives. “Data-center management is not our core business,” McCluskey says.
The Mint team also wanted to put more of its resources into new software development.
“We wanted to be able to scale up for that peak load automatically without spending a lot of time and money acquiring and provisioning new servers every time.” “We see a minimum 200 percent increase in website traffic immediately after January 1 each year,” says Sean McCluskey, director of application development and cloud operations for Intuit. was originally hosted in an internal data center, but the team needed to improve its ability to scale up or down to meet peak traffic demands.