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In today’s technology-driven landscape, ensuring that your applications deliver messages effectively is paramount. Major players like Airbnb, Spotify, Uber, and Yelp have turned to SendGrid as their trusted platform for essential email communications.
Unlike many rapidly growing tech startups, SendGrid was established within a data center framework. Since its inception in 2009, the company has developed a high-performance, scalable private cloud that allows for efficient price-to-performance ratios and rapid server deployment. However, SendGrid has decided to significantly enhance its partnership with AWS, positioning it as their primary cloud service provider. This decision was influenced by the business benefits of the AWS Partner Network (APN), the AWS Marketplace, and the technological advantages offered by AWS’s elastic capabilities and managed services. We are thrilled to announce that SendGrid is officially joining the AWS family as an APN Partner and customer.
Inside SendGrid’s Expanded Relationship with AWS
By Alex Thompson, Chief Architect at SendGrid, an APN Technology Partner
I’m excited to share two major projects we’ve been developing for quite some time. The first is a strengthened alliance with AWS. For years, SendGrid has relied on various cloud providers, including AWS, for critical workloads. With this enhanced relationship, we will deepen our collaboration and extend our presence within AWS. Below, I’ll elaborate on the implications of this for our customers.
The second announcement involves a comprehensive re-architecture of our email processing pipeline, a project we’ve been quietly enhancing for over a year. While this topic warrants its own discussion, the new architecture has been designed to support the SendGrid-AWS partnership from the outset. Our updated pipeline is genuinely cloud-native and optimized for AWS, allowing us to sidestep challenges encountered by other email service providers. It’s essential to narrate both stories to showcase the benefits of AWS that will ultimately aid our customers.
A Brief Overview
Since its founding in 2009, SendGrid has pioneered the concept of transactional Email Service Provider (ESP)—often referred to as a Cloud Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Over the years, we’ve cultivated expertise in addressing the unique challenges associated with operating a high-volume, multi-tenant SaaS email delivery platform, surpassing one trillion emails sent as of March 2017. Many of these challenges are exclusive to this sector, especially within AWS Cloud environments. Experience with single-tenant or on-premises solutions only scratches the surface of what is necessary to thrive as a true Cloud MTA.
At SendGrid, we adhere to our core values: Humble, Honest, Hungry, and Happy, and we are committed advocates for our customers. We take pride in the fact that our clients value our distinctive features such as ease of use, simple integrations, deliverability, reliability, scalability, and performance—attributes that speak volumes.
Why Now?
The saying “success lives at the intersection of preparation and opportunity” resonates when we consider why we chose to become an APN Partner at this moment. For us, preparation meant re-architecting our platform to be cloud-native. Two significant points illustrate why we considered this a prerequisite.
Email operates on a store-and-forward basis, which naturally creates statefulness within the system. Other Cloud MTAs have found that managing stateful compute is ill-suited for the cloud, undermining many of its advantages. As a result, we have decoupled the state from our MTAs in the new architecture, allowing us to fully utilize AWS’s compute elasticity.
Another crucial aspect is IP deliverability, the measure of how many emails sent by a provider reach their intended inboxes. It’s arguably the most critical metric for any Email Service Provider. Notably, maintaining deliverability is a complex challenge, and SendGrid excels in this area. It relies heavily on the reputation of the specific IP addresses we use. We’ve invested years in cultivating our IPs, and the over 50,000 customers utilizing these IPs demonstrate their effectiveness. As we transition to AWS, we’re dedicated to retaining full control of our IPs, understanding that reputations are challenging to build and easily damaged.
Customer Benefits
With much of the groundwork completed, we are poised to accelerate our mission of becoming the world’s most trusted communication platform—our partnership with AWS is rooted in opportunity rather than necessity. While the widely recognized benefits of AWS apply to us, I’ll highlight some nuances specific to a Cloud MTA and how our customers will reap the rewards.
For years, SendGrid has maintained a distributed network of Points of Presence (PoPs) globally to efficiently respond to API and SMTP requests. The performance of these PoPs is influenced by their proximity to our customers. By leveraging AWS’s extensive global infrastructure, we plan to create additional PoPs in various AWS regions, which will enhance responsiveness and reduce latency for our customers.
Managing a high-volume Cloud MTA necessitates near real-time analysis of vast data flows—challenges that require advanced stream processing and machine learning technologies. Currently, we manage the infrastructure for these systems, which incurs overhead. Utilizing AWS tools such as Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Machine Learning will enable us to streamline our processes, allowing more time for developing features that benefit our clients.
To maximize the value SendGrid offers, it’s crucial to visualize and analyze aspects of messaging campaigns, such as deliverability by recipient domain or click/open rates of A/B tests. This continuous enhancement represents a significant engineering challenge due to our volume and the need for flexibility. AWS provides various analytics capabilities like Amazon Athena, Redshift, and AWS Data Pipeline that we are already exploring to enhance how our customers can optimize their messaging strategies.
We will harness AWS to focus on delivering even greater value to our customers at a faster pace. Although we have been working on these initiatives for quite some time, we recognize these steps as the beginning of an exciting journey—if you haven’t already, come join us and help shape the future of messaging! For further insights, check out this blog post on career opportunities.
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