Canada’s leading online performance marketing platform leverages Akka to grow its communities by 240%

55 Rush is Canada's leading online performance marketing and media platform, bringing together Canada's largest and most established virtual communities under a single banner, including over 3.2 million students, recent graduates, and new and expectant parents. Managing hubs with millions of engaged users, 55 Rush specializes in creating custom campaigns that build audiences and drive action. After years of expansion, the firm turned to Akka to build a new platform to house all its disparate systems while providing scalability and fault tolerance for future growth.

At 55 Rush, brands such as CIBC, H&R Block, Unilever, AIR MILES, Mindshare, York University, Philips, Amazon, Sun Life, and others have leveraged its platform to build valuable connections between partners and 55 Rush’s online communities. However, in the wake of the firm’s success, it became clear that they needed a new platform that could consolidate the multiple standalone systems built using PHP and deliver an elastic, reliable, and scalable solution capable of handling the workloads of the world-class brands that make up 55 Rush’s customer base. After evaluating multiple options, the firm turned to Akka as the foundation of this new platform.

The developer team considered ZIO and Vert.x before choosing Akka as the platform of choice for their new solution.

In evaluating Akka, 55 Rush had the following criteria to consider:

• Concurrency and parallelism: The system had to be capable of handling a large number of concurrent tasks and users. Akka simplifies managing multiple threads, ensuring safe concurrency without needing locks or complex synchronization mechanisms.
• Resilient systems: 55 Rush needed a fault-tolerant platform that would meet its client’s needs for reliability and uptime. Akka is favored for its ability to build fault-tolerant systems. Applications built on Akka recover automatically from failures, and the monitoring and resilience model offers an elegant solution.
• Elasticity via Responsive by Design: 55 Rush’s solution needed to respond to rapid, unexpected spikes in workloads, so an elastic framework was required. Akka’s non-blocking and event-driven approach makes it highly scalable for applications that need to respond to real-time data or high loads.
• Scalability: 55 Rush was adding millions of new users and dozens of campaigns, so the ability to grow capacity quickly was vital. Akka is a go-to framework for systems that require horizontal scalability, because they can be distributed across clusters and automatically scale up or down based on load. Developers needing elasticity in their applications find this particularly useful.

Together, these capabilities enabled the team at 55 Rush to achieve multiple capabilities that other solutions could not hope to deliver. Among the options they considered, Akka stood out by offering key features that are difficult to find in other frameworks:

• Actor model: Provides message-driven concurrency without the shared state, avoiding complex thread management and race conditions.
• Fault tolerance: Built-in supervision lets you recover from crashes automatically, supporting resilient "let it crash" systems.
• Distributed systems: Akka clustering allows seamless communication across nodes, simplifying distributed computing and scaling.
• Scalability: Akka makes it possible to run millions of concurrent tasks, unlike heavier thread-based models.
• Backpressure: Akka streaming natively manages data flow between producers and consumers, preventing overload.
• Unified model: Akka handles concurrency, fault tolerance, and distribution in one framework, reducing the need for multiple tools and extra infrastructure layers.
• Persistence: Persistence in Akka saves state, enabling reliable, stateful services.

With Akka, 55 Rush tripled the number of managed communities from three to nine, with an increase in registration of more than 240%. 55 Rush has found that Akka uniquely excels at building scalable and resilient distributed systems with minimal overhead.

After adopting Akka, the team achieved multiple key results, including:

• Higher concurrency: Systems handle more requests with simpler, cleaner code.
• Improved resilience: Automatic recovery from failures keeps systems running smoothly.
• Better scalability: Easily scale across multiple nodes and handle increasing traffic.
• Simplified distributed systems: Actors communicate across nodes seamlessly, reducing complexity.
• Efficient data streaming: Akka streaming manages real-time data efficiently with backpressure.
• Faster development: Unified handling of concurrency, fault tolerance, and distribution speeds up development and reduces maintenance.

55 Rush is the only performance marketing agency in Canada with a built-in, incentivized audience of millions of members across coveted target audiences. This allows the firm to offer its customers reliable zero-party data in a cookie-less world. Brands like CIBC, H&R Block, Unilever, AIR MILES, Mindshare, York University, Philips, Amazon, and Sun Life, among others, rely on 55 Rush and its community of millions to build greater engagement with their customers.