Customer story
Flightradar24 Scales Real-Time Global Flight Tracking with MariaDB Cloud
The world’s most popular flight tracker moved to MariaDB Cloud on AWS to handle continuous real-time updates and sudden traffic surges, while its engineers stay focused on building product.
About Flightradar24
Flightradar24 is the world’s most popular flight tracking service and operates the largest global network of ADS-B flight-tracking receivers. Empowering over 4 million daily users with real-time data on more than 250,000 flights per day, it is a trusted global authority. When breaking aviation news occurs such as high-profile airspace shutdowns, global newsrooms like The Guardian rely on Flightradar24 as the definitive source for real-time intelligence.
The Challenge
To maintain trust and credibility, Flightradar24 requires an always-on database foundation that is as fast and dependable. Originally operating on a standard LAMP stack, Flightradar24 faced major scalability hurdles as its popularity surged. Tracking upwards of 25,000 aircraft simultaneously with positions updating every one to five seconds generated a massive, continuous volume of real-time data that traditional MySQL struggled to sustain.
As their on-premises hardware reached end-of-life, expanding infrastructure became cost-prohibitive. Flightradar24 needed to migrate to the cloud quickly, but they had a strict operational constraint; they wanted to avoid the heavy cost and overhead of building an extensive in-house database administration (DBA) team, keeping their internal budget focused on product development.
“As our business and platform scale, we continue to make major infrastructure investments and raise the bar on our engineering practice, so the database underneath it all has to be both powerful and dependable. We see MariaDB as a solution that grows with us.”
Sean Atkinson
Senior Engineering Manager at Flightradar24
Why MariaDB?
MariaDB Cloud stood out because it runs on AWS, fitting seamlessly into Flightradar24’s existing cloud footprint while providing capabilities that RDS and self-managed alternatives could not.
“MariaDB Cloud gives us automated operations, including patching and upgrades, alongside direct access to the experts who build MariaDB,” said Sean Atkinson, Senior Engineering Manager at Flightradar24. “That combination of automation and deep technical expertise was a major factor for us—and it isn’t something we would get from a generic managed database offering.”
The Solution
By selecting MariaDB Cloud on AWS, Flightradar24 preserved their established database framework while transitioning to a fully automated, managed cloud environment. Their architecture features a primary node with two replicas, optimized by MariaDB MaxScale for sophisticated query management. MaxScale effectively balances the workload by directing substantial read traffic from the API and global website to independent replicas, ensuring the primary path remains protected for critical, write-intensive tasks from Python and C++ backend services.
A vital component of this migration was the ability to delegate historical data archiving, partitioning, and day-to-day maintenance to the MariaDB Remote DBA service.
The Impact
Enterprise Uptime for Traffic Spikes
By migrating to MariaDB Cloud, Flightradar24 achieved a highly stable, always-on infrastructure capable of effortlessly absorbing sudden, massive traffic surges when global aviation news breaks.
Architectural Optimization without Overhead
Direct access to vendor experts provides proactive guidance on complex schema design and database indexing. Offloading partitioning and manual patching frees internal developers to focus entirely on building new user-facing features.
Guaranteed 24/7 Peace of Mind
Because Flightradar24’s reputation hinges on reliable uptime, the 24/7 on-call coverage provided by MariaDB’s expert team ensures round-the-clock protection that would be cost-prohibitive to build natively.
“MariaDB Cloud allows us to seamlessly scale capacity without having to rebuild our operational model every time. We trust them to handle the hard parts, so we can focus on growing Flightradar24 for the millions of people who use it every day.”
Sean Atkinson
Senior Engineering Manager at Flightradar24
Future Outlook
As Flightradar24 continues to expand its global footprint, MariaDB Cloud provides a flexible foundation that scales alongside the platform. Looking ahead, the engineering team is currently evaluating advanced MariaDB capabilities, including serverless architectures and emerging agentic AI features, to further innovate how they process and deliver real-time global aviation intelligence.
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