Protagona

Migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to set the stage for application scalability, high availability and take full advantage of managed services

Challenge

Our customer approached our team to architect a new solution for their primary database cluster running within their datacenter. The current database cluster lacked redundancy and required a substantial amount of effort from their small team of DBAs to operate and maintain. Their Operations team was caught in a cycle of reacting to issues and wasn’t able to focus on the strategic direction for their data. They needed a solution that gave them better fault tolerance across multiple regions and allowed their small operations team to scale effectively to other parts of the organization. 

 

Solution

Protagona walked the DBAs and Infrastructure teams through the features available as part of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The client chose to stick with PostgreSQL as their preferred database engine and leverage the Amazon RDS management platform to reduce operational overhead. Our team deployed a multi-region PostgreSQL cluster and configured it for increased read performance and high availability. Read replicas were deployed in the secondary region with automated failover in the event the primary region becomes unavailable. Disaster Recover testing exercises were defined for the full stack and executed on a routine schedule.

Tech Stack

Amazon RDS

Postgres

Terraform

Jenkins

Datadog

Outcome

Increased Resiliency – The new database cluster was deployed in us-east for the primary nodes with read replicas in us-west. Health checks were set up to determine if the primary nodes in us-east were operating as expected. In the event of a failure, read replicas in us-west were promoted to be primary and quickly resolve the outage until us-east came back online.

 

Streamlined Operations – Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) managed many of the routine operational tasks that had previously been performed by the small team of DBAs. Storage management and scaling considerations were now defined up front and automatically applied by the Amazon RDS service. This enabled development teams to own more of the database configuration, reducing hand offs and allowing quicker lead time for new features.

 

Focus on Strategy – With many of the operational responsibilities taken care of by RDS, the Data Engineering team now had increased capacity to plan and execute their data strategy, providing critical insights to their business partners and customers.

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