Database management without the DBA
Consolidation of operations to drive improved efficiency, coupled with the migration to a more complex, highly-available database technology stack.
Background
HolidayPirates is an online travel company for countries in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States. With their exceptional travel deals, they gained the trust of millions of travelers who have used their services. HolidayPirates specialize in creating personalized travel plans to fit their customers’ unique needs. They currently have over 10 million Facebook followers with more than 30 million people visiting the site.
The HolidayPirates website experience is personalized by country, giving their customers a “home country” feel when they browse to plan their travel.
Challenge
Operating out of various locations, HolidayPirates had different websites, different databases, and IT infrastructures maintained by different teams. Each team managed its servers, databases, setups, and web systems which increased hardware but also operating costs.
As they grew, it became difficult to manage data from multiple repositories; hence they decided to migrate all data to a single centralized source that could be accessed by web systems in the different countries.
They started the consolidation process with the purchase of new servers. They then began embarking on the search for a database management tool to manage the databases. HolidayPirates wanted to have an automated solution, not only to manage and monitor their databases, but they also wanted an expert team to consult and be on standby, as this would then reduce the need for an in-house DBA.
We were maintaining several databases and were running at risk for a single point of failure. Managing, monitoring, and scaling databases were just taking far too much time and we desperately needed a one-stop database automation solution.
Abdalaziz Mohamed, Senior DevOps Engineer at HolidayPirates
Their tremendous growth required an upgrade to their existing MySQL setup to Galera Cluster. This technology change warranted a tool to facilitate this deployment seamlessly as they needed it in a short turnaround time.
HolidayPirates needed a fully automated solution to manage their databases and the support of experts to help solve their technical issues, which in return would minimize manual and time-consuming tasks of the IT operations team.
They specifically required a company to be able to “do it all” to manage their databases and provide support services at all times which relieves them of their heavy reliance on DBA’s and guarantees a 99.99% service uptime for their customers to tour around worry-free.
Solution
HolidayPirates’ search for a database management solution came to an end when they found ClusterControl by Severalnines. ClusterControl could deploy, manage, and monitor their new Galera Cluster setup via a web interface and they could find no better match to this. “I couldn’t find any other tools that did everything we needed to do through a GUI,” said Mohamed.
ClusterControl was the only database automation tool with a great user interface rich in high-end features.
Abdalaziz Mohamed, Senior DevOps Engineer at HolidayPirates
Outcome
ClusterControl’s advanced features like automatic repair, recovery, and backup features appealed the most to HolidayPirates, as they provided assurance that they would have high availability at all times. “ClusterControl was the only database automation tool with a great user interface and rich in high-end features,” said Mohamed.
In addition to the features, Severalnines offers through their support team expertise in Galera Cluster, which HolidayPirates needed and leveraged to help them with their month-long migration and implementation.
“With ClusterControl, we now can focus on other operations; the databases need minimal care from us,” said Mohamed. “We are now always notified about the status of our database and able to take corrective and preventive actions instantaneously to ensure high uptime.”
Summary
Deploy, manage, and monitor your database from a single GUI
With ClusterControl, you don’t need advanced DBA skills. With a little support and resources from the website, HolidayPirates was about to scale and manage their databases in no time. They were impressed by how ClusterControl manages complex database operations via a web interface, saving them time and money, and eliminating the need for a new DBA.
Reduce risk with automated repair and recovery
ClusterControl’s ability to manage database failover automatically with improved uptime was a key feature for HolidayPirates. In addition to this, ClusterControl’s ability to automatically repair nodes, especially for Galera Cluster, further reduced their chance of a prolonged outage.
Built-in integration with Slack
(i.e. Slack) was an added advantage for the HolidayPirates operations team, as now they can stay up to date with issues and monitor any shortcomings in the status of their database. This allowed the technical team to
respond to any problems on errors or failures immediately.
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