traffic spikes with no downtime during launch. 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.

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.

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.