Amplifon is the world’s leading hearing solutions company, distinguished by superior expertise and a commitment to unlimited care. The company serves millions of customers through a network of approximately 10,000 locations across 25 countries and relies on the dedication of 20,600 employees and collaborators, including a specialized team of around 9,000 hearing care professionals.
The company needed to migrate a complex database deployment to the cloud while minimizing operational and data risk, and turned to Percona for support. With patient data at the center of their operations, the stakes were high, making a reliable, zero-data-loss migration an absolute requirement.
The joint project delivered:
Amplifon
Healthcare
20000+
Expert Consulting & Services
MySQL
Running healthcare technology operations is inherently challenging. For Amplifon, that complexity was amplified by the need to support dozens of partners delivering health care services to millions of users, all relying on MySQL databases that had grown organically over time.
Matthew Wernette, Cloud Engineer at Amplifon, led the initiative to modernize the company’s database strategy. “Our systems were reliable, but we wanted to further modernize our approach and move to the cloud to additionally improve performance and reduce operational risk. That meant we needed to plan ahead,” explains Wernette.
Amplifon turned to Percona for help planning the migration to ensure it would deliver effectively and reduce risk at every stage. They needed expert support to plan an upgrade to the latest version of MySQL and a move to the cloud, all without putting patient data at risk.
Percona assessed Amplifon’s existing MySQL architecture, versions, and operational practices to identify upgrade compatibility and data integrity risks that would not have been visible during a simple lift-and-shift. Working together, Amplifon and Percona designed a phased migration plan that allowed each step to be tested, validated, and reversed if necessary, enabling the company to modernize incrementally with minimal downtime and no data loss.
Percona began by updating Amplifon’s data management processes and frameworks to follow modern standards. The team implemented best-practice performance tuning, backup designs, and replication across all database workloads. This included binlog and Mydumper backups, replication safeguards, and query optimization to ensure recoverability and validate cutover safety before any production migration occurred. This standardization made it easier to manage all application data in a consistent, predictable way.
Once the updated database management approach was in place, Amplifon led migration planning and validation to ensure that all workloads were fully tested before cutover. This confirmed application compatibility, verified that performance demands were met, and established a resilient, monitored platform with predictable behavior going forward.
To de-risk the production cutover, Percona implemented with Amplifon a rigorous parallel testing framework using pt-upgrade, running production workloads across live and staging environments simultaneously. This allowed the team to surface compatibility issues between MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8.0 on AWS Aurora 3.0 before they could affect production systems — including a phased move from on-premise MySQL 5.7 to AWS EC2, and then to MySQL 8.0 on AWS Aurora 3.0.
“We were able to see the risks before we carried out our production cutover, so we made sure our deployment went as smoothly as possible.” — Matthew Wernette, Cloud Engineer, Amplifon
Overall, Percona helped Amplifon execute a major infrastructure modernization in deliberate, validated phases — updating mission-critical healthcare systems with minimal disruption and no patient data loss.
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