The challenge
Property.ca is one of Canada’s leading real estate companies, managing more than $1.2 billion in transactions and more than a million users. The company supports buyers, sellers and retail agents across Canada by developing new tools and implementing innovative technologies so that it can continuously innovate around the real estate journey. By focusing on the overall digital experience for both customers and agents, Property.ca aims to open the door to deep, hyper-local data that enables buyers to make better informed decisions.
Hirad Roshandel, Senior Vice President of Technology at Property.ca, leads a team of developers, operations staff, and designers who execute the company’s technology strategy. This includes overseeing multiple engineering teams that focus on websites, consumer-facing products, and an internal CRM system for real estate agents. As the company expands its operations and increases sales activities, Roshandel recognized the need to update its approach to infrastructure and data.
The solution
Roshandel and his team selected Percona as its partner to manage and support its data strategy. Previously, the company used a managed service from Digital Ocean for its databases based on MySQL. However, this service lacked flexibility to customize and optimize the database to fit the requirements of Property.ca. In addition the tools for monitoring and analyzing slow queries were limited, increasing the difficulty to troubleshoot and improve performance in key areas. Without this level of visibility and control Property.ca could not proactively plan for growth and ensure their databases would scale with the rest of the business. Consequently, Roshandel decided to collaborate with Percona on how to increase performance, scalability, and visibility for the entire database stack as part of Property.ca’s overall technology strategy.
Percona recommended that Property.ca move from its existing infrastructure design to a new approach that would offer greater insights to the team, higher flexibility in deployment configuration, and better performance for the level of spend available. Following this consultation, Percona supported Property.ca in migrating over to its new infrastructure based on Percona Server for MySQL with Orchestrator running on Digital Ocean Droplets, which offered automated failover and high availability. Property.ca was then onboarded to Percona’s Managed Service platform, which assumed responsibility for database management duties for the instances involved.
Working with Percona
Roshandel and the Property.ca technology team want to be as hands-off with their databases as possible, so they use Percona Managed Services to handle their strategy and implementation together. This enables the Property.ca team to focus on software development and creating new services for both customers and agents.
As part of its Managed Services offering, Percona provides Property.ca with guidance and proactive advice on how to improve performance and reliability for the company’s database technology stack. As the company expanded and launched new functionality into the market, the Percona team recognized that further expansion would be needed. In response, Percona worked with the Property.ca team to carry out a successful migration from Digital Ocean to AWS, based on Percona Server for MySQL running on AWS EC2 instances.
This migration supports the company’s future goals regarding performance and growth in its digital services and ensures that the team’s developers can get full insight into how their applications are performing around data, too.