Percona Managed Services Provides BoxyCharm with a 24x7x365 Engineering Team

Business Challenge

Who Is BoxyCharm?

Headquartered in South Florida, BoxyCharm is a beauty box subscription service, offering popular and chic beauty products, including nail care, hair products, skincare, and cosmetics. Founded in 2013, BoxyCharm is growing more than 100% year-over-year and has a community of more than 2.4 million social media followers and millions of monthly online visitors. The company currently relies on Amazon RDS for MySQL for its database.

The Challenge

When BoxyCharm first began to grow rapidly, the company had only a single employee to manage its cloud-based e-commerce database. This presented a significant challenge around resource allocation. How could the company ensure someone was always available to respond to database issues 24x7x365 while still keeping the headcount down?

The Solution

To ensure a smooth-running database and an optimal customer experience—without adding a single employee to the internal team—BoxyCharm turned to Percona. The Percona Managed Services team are “always on,” providing highly experienced Percona engineers able to respond immediately to any issue—anytime, anywhere. Percona engineers also support BoxyCharm with day-to-day management of the database, including deploying patches and updates and adding indexes.  

Key Benefits

Percona Managed Services eliminated the need for BoxyCharm to hire multiple MySQL database specialists to ensure 24x7x365 coverage. The Percona team rapidly corrected configuration problems as they arose and suggested other fixes as needed. Percona worked closely with BoxyCharm to improve their Aurora database performance during BoxyCharm’s regular online sales promotions. Percona looked into the cause of the problem and made significant improvements, ensuring the database could use its query cache to remove bottlenecks and was able to double its maximum concurrent users in load testing. This resulted in far more efficient performance on the database cluster during BoxyCharm’s site promotions, and enabled the environment to remain stable during these high traffic events. For the Vice President of Cloud Engineering at BoxyCharm, Percona engineers are an extension of his internal team, but he doesn’t have to hire people, assess their expertise, conduct performance reviews, or worry if there are still knowledge gaps. He knows that Percona has him covered with top-tier professionals. Despite having grown his internal DevOps team over the years, BoxyCharm’s Vice President of Cloud Engineering has maintained his engagement with Percona. BoxyCharm has migrated to a clustered environment for its cloud-based MySQL database, which has grown to nearly 300 GB in size, and Percona’s expertise has been essential in helping BoxyCharm understand the best approaches to this more complex deployment. BoxyCharm’s Vice President of Cloud Engineering commented, “Our Percona engineers are heroes every day. They are always available and easy to work with. Their broad experience with thousands of MySQL deployments means they have more knowledge at their fingertips than our internal team could ever develop.”

Technologies and Services Used

Percona Managed Services

Percona Managed Services offer a flexible managed database service delivering world-class, enterprise-grade expertise across a variety of high-performance enterprise database environments. Percona experts help keep databases running at peak performance, so teams can focus on the core business. Businesses can choose to rely on Percona to augment current resources or to fully manage all requirements.