Pythian and Shutterfly Roll Out a Scalable Cloud Database

Business Challenge

Shutterfly needed to develop a cloud-based MySQL back end quickly without disrupting their existing customers. They turned to Pythian’s DevOps and MySQL experts who built, tested, and migrated a scalable cloud environment—ideal for web-scale growth—and significantly improved application stability and flexibility. The solution was delivered on time and successfully supported traffic spikes with no downtime during launch.

Critical Issues

The acquisition of ThisLife brought new challenges in terms of developing a scalable, cloud-based database backend. Shutterfly engineers had already designed a scalable and flexible architecture for the new application and had chosen a sharded MySQL database due to its availability features and ability to cost-effectively scale horizontally. What they needed now was expertise in cloud database replication, sharding, monitoring, and tooling. Finding a provider that could scale the backend affordably and without causing any disruption to existing customer activity or business operations became the top priority in layering ThisLife’s technology onto Shutterfly’s platform. With only three months until the scheduled launch of the newly integrated product, time was of the essence.

We Provided

Shutterfly thoroughly examined using a number of off-the-shelf options; however, they ultimately chose to enlist the expert help of Blackbird.io (now Pythian). In addition to having the opportunity to learn from experienced cloud infrastructure developers, working with consultants meant that Shutterfly could customize their sharding algorithm to better align with the unique demands of their business model and ultimately improve the overall flexibility of their application. Pythian offered deep MySQL and distributed systems experience, along with a DevOps team that provided expertise in configuration management, orchestration, and operational visibility, which was critical to helping Shutterfly integrate with ThisLife and deploy the new application on time. Together, Shutterfly and Pythian designed a modified, sharded MySQL environment with a focus on operational visibility, backup and recovery, scalability, and fault tolerance; all of which were important to minimizing outages and maximizing profitability when the application was up and running. After being built and tested, Pythian helped perform the migration and provided post-migration support. Throughout the process, Pythian’s technical service delivery and project management teams oversaw the launch, tracked and closed any gaps, and ensured constant communication between all necessary parties.

Result

At launch, Shutterfly’s new databases successfully supported the spike in traffic without any downtime. All systems, applications, and servers ran smoothly throughout the various email campaigns they launched over the following six months, while Pythian’s 24x7 support services provided constant support and monitoring. Today, ThisLife uses a combination of legacy Relational Database Services and sharded MySQL databases running on Amazon® Web Services (AWS). With this new, fully scalable, and robust infrastructure, they’ve had consistent availability and no performance issues. Their sharded MySQL database allows them to make changes to the application and intelligently spreads data loads across multiple systems. With multiple clusters running, Shutterfly knows that if one cluster fails, the others won’t be affected.

Technologies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) MySQL Amazon RDS Chef

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