IT Auditing & Consulting for a Top Online Retailer

Business challenge

Starting as an online electronics store, our client grew into the top online retailer in Ukraine and the owner of the biggest eCommerce retail platform. This platform helps businesses provide products and services to customers all over Ukraine. As our client’s business grew considerably, the database architecture it relied on was in heavy use by customers and was unable to keep pace with the company’s operational growth and usage. The eCommerce database design was outdated and the size of the database itself (measured in the gigabytes) was growing substantially, rapidly, and unsustainably, slowing down performance on a regular basis.

Our client needed a fresh look by an outside expert at their eCommerce database design and enterprise architecture. With broad experience in IT infrastructure consulting services and the know-how to build and deliver stable and scalable databases, Intellias was brought in to analyze the client’s current environment and eCommerce database design, provide database consulting services, and offer performance improvement recommendations.

Solution delivered

Skillfully executing a database audit and consulting on a project of this scale requires a deep understanding of the client’s architecture, detailed knowledge of various database management systems, and an appreciation of the client’s growth strategy. After thoroughly analyzing the current environment and eCommerce database design infrastructure, our DevOps expert defined the following criteria that helped us define a viable strategy for migrating the client’s database to a new database management system:

• Starting database volume of 100 GB with expected quarterly growth of 50 percent
• Initial expected throughput of 100 RPS
• Virtual machines in use feature 4 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM
• Need to eliminate database idle time

To achieve greater reliability and scalability, we assessed the MySQL and PostgreSQL data management systems, examining data protection, replication methods, and known cluster issues. Our thorough analysis showed that both MySQL and PostgreSQL have their advantages; however, working with large volumes of data required the high performance and replication methods offered by PostgreSQL.

While elaborating an effective solution to bring maximum value to our client, we focused on making the best use of PostgreSQL. To eliminate data loss during replication, we analyzed the pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous replication and suggested combining these two approaches within one cluster to guarantee that no data is lost when switching between servers.

We also collected the most critical PostgreSQL cluster issues that could affect the performance of the client’s environment and presented the development team with action items for smoothly setting up a high-availability cluster. To maintain high-availability clusters, Patroni and Stolon were suggested as the most advanced cluster management tools.

Business outcome

Intellias presented the client with a sound roadmap for migrating to PostgreSQL — a move that would have a significant impact on our client’s operational growth. Our viable migration strategy ensured greater reliability and scalability for the client’s eCommerce database design and environment. We also provided the client’s development team with IT consultancy and technical support while bringing the strategy to life. For more on this topic, read how Intellias created a roadmap for migrating a retail marketplace platform to mitigate risks and push changes to the infrastructure development process.