BlaBlaCar Chooses Percona To Help Keep the Engines Revving

The Challenge

Headquartered in Paris, France, BlaBlaCar is the world’s leading community-based travel network. The company enables more than 100 million members to share rides across 22 countries via its website and mobile apps. To BlaBlaCar’s members, commuting flexibility is a major draw of the platform: They expect to be able to schedule a long-distance carpool a few days in advance or book at a moment’s notice. Because of this, BlaBlaCar must ensure it maintains a fast and reliable system architecture. For BlaBlaCar, reliability is the key to building a best-in-class platform and securing the future of the business.

The Solution

Percona provided BlaBlaCar with unbiased expertise and support for running MariaDB. BlaBlaCar worked closely with the Percona Support team, and thanks to this collaboration, BlablaCar learned more about the internals of MariaDB and was able to implement performance improvements to increase mission-critical application uptime. This support saved the BlaBlaCar team time and energy, which they then used to innovate and consolidate their platform. Even though BlaBlaCar has a dedicated Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) team in place, Maxime Fouilleul, Engineering Manager for BlaBlaCar’s DBRE team, said they always learned something new when contacting Percona engineers. The direct and privileged link to Percona engineers, he said, made him and his team feel more secure in overcoming technical challenges. Maxime and his team plan to continue collaborating with Percona, with Maxime calling Percona’s expert engineers a “luxury” the company uses “several times per year.”

Working With Percona

BlaBlaCar chose Percona because of its transparency, unbiased nature, and dedication to the open source database world. The company appreciates that Percona’s priority is to help and not to push clients toward Percona products. BlablaCar believes the DNA of Percona matches its philosophy of always “choosing the right tool for the job.”