[CASE STUDY]
How Beacon Rebuilt PowerUp’s Infrastructure for 100x Scalability and Six-Figure Savings
50%
Annual R&D Opex savings
100x
Improvement in scalability with no downtime
5 hours
Engineering time freed up per week for product development
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Before Beacon, we were constantly firefighting infrastructure issues and watching users get stuck in queues during our busiest seasons. Now we scale effortlessly and ship weekly instead of monthly. That transformation gave us the stability to focus on what matters: delivering an exceptional experience for our customers.
Robert Meth
CEO & GM of PowerUp Sports
Rigid Infrastructure and Costly Scaling Limits
Rigid Infrastructure Hurting User Experience
PowerUp was hosted on a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure. These VMs couldn’t autoscale to handle traffic surges during peak registration season, which forced the team to throttle concurrent users, resulting in a poor experience for queued users and occasional downtime during critical periods.
High Infrastructure Costs
Cloud hosting was a disproportionately high expense for PowerUp because they relied on costly Windows-licensed virtual machines (VMs) on Azure. The lack of elasticity in the infrastructure made it difficult to scale efficiently to meet demand without incurring significant additional costs.
Operational Bottlenecks
The technical limitations of the environment slowed down development cycles. The system’s architecture made upgrades risky, documentation sparse, and database performance inconsistent — all of which drained engineering capacity and created ongoing maintenance burdens.
Modernizing PowerUp’s Stack for Scale and Speed
Rearchitecting for Scale
Beacon's forward deployed engineering team led a full-scale modernization of PowerUp’s technical infrastructure soon after acquisition. Beacon's engineers containerized the application using Docker, enabling PowerUp to migrate from static Azure VMs to Azure’s autoscaling App Service, which dramatically improved elasticity and resilience. At the same time, the MSSQL database was optimized and moved from the VMs to Azure SQL, ensuring better performance and managed scalability. Beacon's engineers also upgraded the PHP runtime to improve speed and resource utilization.
Elevating Developer Experience and System Monitoring
These changes enabled PowerUp's engineering team to leverage modern CI/CD workflows and eliminate VM-level management overhead. In parallel, Beacon engineers onboarded PowerUp on GitHub for source control, Grafana for observability, and PagerDuty for intelligent alerting and incident response — together accelerating release cadence and improving overall system reliability.
Leveraging DeepWiki for Optimization and Documentation
Beacon utilized Cognition AI's DeepWiki to automatically generate a living technical wiki and pinpoint inefficiencies in the existing codebase. This automation reduced manual documentation time, helped new engineers onboard faster, and flagged redundant or underperforming components.
Six-Figure Savings and 100x Scalability
Massive Cost and Efficiency Gains
Beacon’s modernization efforts delivered measurable operational leverage. The infrastructure migration unlocked six figures in annual R&D operating expense savings. The new autoscaling environment improved performance and reliability by 100x, eliminating queuing and ensuring zero downtime during peak usage.
Developer Productivity Unlocked
With infrastructure management streamlined and a modern toolchain in place, PowerUp’s engineering team now ships weekly releases — a dramatic improvement in developer velocity. DeepWiki, telemetry dashboards in Grafana, and proactive alerting through PagerDuty give the team a clearer understanding of system behavior, reducing troubleshooting time and improving decision-making. Together, these improvements save about five hours per week on maintenance and manual monitoring, time that’s now redirected toward building new product features and elevating the overall user experience.
Scalable, Future-Ready Platform
PowerUp now operates on a modern, elastic cloud stack that scales automatically with demand. The rearchitected environment ensures predictable costs, continuous uptime, and seamless performance even during heavy traffic periods. Customers now enjoy faster load times, no queuing, and uninterrupted access — delivering a markedly improved user experience while giving the team flexibility to innovate faster and support long-term growth.
Takeaways
For PowerUp, Beacon’s engineering modernization eliminated structural bottlenecks that had limited the company’s ability to scale. By cutting infrastructure costs, improving reliability, and building a flexible technical foundation, Beacon enabled PowerUp’s team to focus on innovation and customer experience instead of maintenance.
For Beacon, this transformation was another example of how its forward-deployed engineering model can unlock operational leverage across a portfolio — driving efficiency, scalability, and growth that individual companies would struggle to achieve alone.
