SoundCloud’s production engineering team became bottlenecked
At SoundCloud, their IT teams had a split focus between product development and engineering and were responsible for the management of the databases that support their customer-facing application. The teams manage all aspects of their databases, including scaling, schema changes, query performance, optimization, outage planning, capacity planning—everything. Then, if something unusual came up—such as database performance problems or complications building a new database—they would consult their central team.
The central team, called Production Engineering, comprises the veterans who support other teams on specific projects within the company. They build tools to improve the efficiency of the relational databases, and are responsible for any customization that were needed for the environment.
SoundCloud, like many rapidly growing companies, operated with a lean and agile technology team. While this approach worked well under normal circumstances, it created a significant challenge when unexpected database issues arose—bottlenecking development and customer experience.
Their capacity-strapped teams struggled to respond quickly enough to customer needs, hindering their ability to provide timely support. While adding a team member could address minor capacity constraints, this solution proved unsustainable as SoundCloud's needs scaled. They faced the growing predicament of needing more support than their current model could provide, making it difficult to maintain responsiveness and customer satisfaction.
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