The challenge
Bold Commerce supports customers in the fast-paced world of retail, providing omnichannel retailers and direct-to-consumer brands with the tools to make checking out easier, faster, and more efficient for shoppers. Bold Commerce’s headless checkout platform helps retailers pull together payment systems to expand the number of options that they can support for customers as well as personalizing the shopping process.
The company also helps merchants enhance and personalize the customer journey around platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce.
Underneath its payment platform, Bold Commerce relies on the open source database MySQL for data processing and management. Yet the world of technology stops for no one , and the Bold Commerce team had to consider what they would do when MySQL 5.7 reached End of Life (EOL).
The Bold Commerce technology team managing this project, led by Vice President of Technology Craig Kinloch-Melia and Database Administrator Asmaa Al-Rawi, saw the update process as an opportunity to also improve overall performance and reliability. Understanding the importance of this MySQL modernization project, the Bold Commerce team decided to bring in Percona to migrate to Percona Server for MySQL 8.
The solution
After The Bold Commerce and Percona teams evaluated the environment and their options, they agreed that the best course of action was an upgrade of MySQL to 8.0 along with implementation of Percona Server for MySQL. Percona’s version of MySQL provides a secure, open source, enterprise-grade MySQL environment with additional scalability and performance features. Alongside this, the team wanted to upgrade the operating system that ran its key database servers.
In addition to moving to Percona Server for MySQL, the Bold Commerce team decided to evaluate their approach to system redundancy and availability. For eCommerce systems, high availability systems that can support minimal downtime are essential to prevent potential lost sales or customer dissatisfaction. The system also had to be scalable to handle the unpredictable but high loads that retail companies have.
Working with Percona
Percona’s team worked with the Bold Commerce DBAs and the Site Reliability team to design a new clustered system with additional bandwidth for performance, stability and increased availability. The implementation included cross-site and cross-regional replication, providing better disaster recovery and availability functionality than the previous implementation.
This cross-site support helps Bold Commerce fulfill its contractual obligations with partners that require data replication in secure regions like the EU or Canada. This redundancy increases overall availability, reduces the risk of data loss, and makes Bold more attractive to potential clients.
Working with Percona’s Managed Services team allowed Bold Commerce to complete its implementation faster than it could achieve working on its own. The Percona team was able to specify and design a highly complex environment that had to work at scale and support the company’s growth alongside its demanding retail customers.
Percona works with innovative companies on implementing and managing open source databases, as well as offering support, managed services, and consulting for those customers looking for additional expertise. From open source tools for database management through to 24/7 support, Percona provides independent advice on what approach companies should take to meet their goals.