bigbasket is India's largest online grocery delivery platform, serving millions of customers across the country through a suite of services ranging from scheduled fresh deliveries to rapid 10-minute fulfillment. A valued member of the Tata Group, bigbasket manages its own logistics, cold storage, and supply chain infrastructure; all underpinned by a large-scale AWS RDS database environment that must perform reliably around the clock.
When database instability and rising cloud costs became a barrier to operational efficiency, bigbasket turned to Percona ExpertOps to stabilize, optimize, and modernize their RDS MySQL environment. The results were significant and fast-moving.
Percona ExpertOps delivered for bigbasket:
bigbasket
E-commerce
10.000 +
Percona ExpertOps, Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
MySQL
Operating at the scale of one of India's largest online grocery platforms means that database performance and reliability are not just technical concerns—they are business-critical. bigbasket's AWS RDS MySQL environment supports everything from bbnow's rapid 10-minute delivery windows to bbdaily's subscription fulfillment operations, where even brief instability has a direct impact on customers and revenue.
Prior to engaging Percona, bigbasket's approach to database problems was to upscale instance sizes rather than address root causes. This left the environment unstable, inefficiently configured, and running on outdated MySQL versions, while driving AWS costs to unsustainable levels. Database outages caused by the previous partner further eroded confidence in the infrastructure.
Akhilesh Kumar, Principal DBA at bigbasket, joined the company in November 2025 and quickly took stock of what the environment required. Responsible for all database operations and working closely with both application teams and bigbasket's leadership, Akhilesh recognized that the RDS instances needed more than routine management; they needed a strategic overhaul. Query optimization, proper database configuration, storage rationalization, and a long-overdue MySQL upgrade were all on the critical path.
bigbasket engaged Percona ExpertOps to take over daily database operations, including 24/7 performance monitoring, query optimization, storage and configuration management, and routine maintenance such as patching and backups, and provide the strategic expertise needed to address the instability and inefficiency the previous partner had left behind. What began as an engagement to manage RDS operations and plan a MySQL upgrade quickly expanded as the full scope of optimization opportunity became clear.
Percona brought a structured, root-cause-focused approach that stood in contrast to the previous partner's pattern of masking problems through oversized instances. Rather than upscaling, the Percona team worked with Akhilesh to rightsize RDS instances to match the actual requirements of each database workload, reducing cost without sacrificing performance. Storage optimization, query tuning, and configuration improvements addressed the underlying inefficiencies that had been driving both instability and unnecessary spend.
Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) was deployed alongside AWS CloudWatch to give bigbasket comprehensive visibility into database performance, enabling proactive identification of issues before they could affect operations.
With Percona ExpertOps managing daily operations and guiding the optimization strategy, bigbasket's database environment underwent a significant transformation in a short period of time. Instance rightsizing, storage tuning, and configuration improvements collectively reduced bigbasket's AWS bill by approximately 33% per month, bringing monthly spend down substantially.
The work is ongoing. Storage optimization on an additional database recovered a further cost per month in May 2026. A Blue-Green upgrade to MySQL 8.4 across multiple RDS instances was completed at the end of May 2026 and generated additional savings by avoiding extended support costs.
Beyond the cost savings, the engagement delivered something equally important: stability. The pattern of outages and reactive upscaling that characterized the previous partnership has been replaced by a proactive, structured approach to database management, one that addresses root causes rather than symptoms. bigbasket’s now well managed systems are showing far less signs of stress and issues overall have been reduced significantly.
For Akhilesh and the bigbasket team, having Percona as a partner has meant access to deep MySQL and AWS RDS expertise without the overhead of building that capability internally, and the confidence that comes from knowing their database environment is being managed by specialists.
Further Gains from Graviton Migration
In June 2026, the team extended the optimization work to compute architecture, migrating one of their reporting replicas from an x86-based r5.4xlarge to an AWS Graviton4, a like-for-like sizing swap with no application changes required. Within 48 hours, peak CPU utilization dropped by roughly 47%, and peak database load fell by about 72%, giving the environment substantial headroom for traffic growth. Building on this result, seven additional reporting replicas have since been migrated to Graviton, with a further round of downsizing planned once a month of post-migration stability monitoring that confirms the instances can safely be right-sized again. Once all instances have been migrated to Graviton and downsized accordingly, an additional significant savings is anticipated over the next two quarters. The result reinforces the broader pattern of this engagement: addressing root causes in architecture and configuration rather than simply scaling infrastructure to keep pace with growth.
Results
Since engaging Percona ExpertOps in late 2025, bigbasket has achieved measurable, ongoing improvements across cost, stability, and performance:
Percona Products and Services Used:
bigbasket (legal name: Innovative Retail Concepts Pvt Ltd) is India's largest online grocery delivery platform, founded in 2011 and headquartered in Bengaluru. A valued subsidiary of the Tata Group, bigbasket serves millions of customers through a range of services including bbdaily, bbnow, and bbinstant, and operates its own logistics, cold storage, and supply chain infrastructure.
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