Untappd didn’t become the social network of record for beer lovers without some serious technology behind it. At any given moment, 750,000 of its registered users might load something into the Friends Feed, impressions of a rare porter, say, or the secret place that sells Russian River’s Pliny the Elder. In order to take beer to new heights, Untappd also had to take the infrastructure behind the app to the next level. If the Friends Feed goes down — up to a quarter million data points per day — the platform loses its most important feature: social sharing.
Although its following is huge, the Untappd company consists of two beer enthusiasts working on their passion outside of their day jobs. Only in the age of apps and web-scale computing would this be possible. The founders, Greg Avola and Tim Mather, turned to ObjectRocket by Rackspace to keep all of their MongoDB data running around the clock. They needed massive scalability to keep the conversation about beer fast and flowing.
Today Untappd retrieves millions of MongoDB data records to make all of its recommendations local to the person checked into the mobile app. After all, East Coasters don’t want a rare beer recommended to them if it’s only brewed and sold in California. Fast, geo-aware MongoDB queries and automatically scaled infrastructure on ObjectRocket have helped Untappd take its love of beer to a global audience.
Read more about Untappd in a blog post by co-founder Greg Avola.

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