Sailthru by Zeta supports clients around delivering effective and innovative customer journeys across multiple channels, from email and SMS messages through to mobile push, in-app and web environments. The company relies on its database infrastructure to operate at speed. But the company’s MongoDB infrastructure was expensive to operate and support due to high licensing costs. With Percona, the Zeta team was able to cut its operating costs around its databases while maintaining full compatibility with its existing applications.
$1M saved annually: Shift from MongoDB to Percona Server for MongoDB reduced spend dramatically
0 application changes: Percona Server for MongoDB was a drop-in replacement
Developer team maintained: Investment maintained in developers to carry on innovation
The Challenge
When you deliver services to customers, you have to keep them informed. Managing that interaction across multiple channels simultaneously, with the right personalization and performance, can be a struggle. Sailthru by Zeta provides customer journey management for customers that delivers substantial uplifts in conversion rates, time saved on campaign builds and increases in subscriber numbers and customers across media, entertainment and retail sectors.
At the heart of this performance is data. For Zeta’s customers, performance, speed and reliability are essential. For Sailthru, MongoDB has been a trusted technology for years running on AWS. But the increasing costs to run MongoDB were challenging. On the eve of a significant renewal that would cost the company more than $1million, Jethro Carr, Vice President of Engineering at Zeta, knew that there had to be an alternative approach.
The Solution
Carr turned to Percona for help. With Percona Server for MongoDB, Carr could move the company’s existing and critical MongoDB databases to an alternative platform. Percona Server for MongoDB is a fully compatible drop-in replacement for MongoDB Enterprise complete with enterprise-class functionality for security, availability, backup, and scalability.
“We were facing a significant increase in our licensing costs, mainly related to backup. We wanted to reduce our costs around running MongoDB, but we did not want to compromise on how we operate or affect our application stack. We have a team of 52 developers working on our services, and we did not want to either affect their productivity or reduce the team size. Looking at Percona, we could see an immediate return on our investment and avoid any potential challenges around migration,” said Carr.
Carr evaluated other approaches to running MongoDB, including using AWS DocumentDB. However, those options carried significantly more risk for the team around potential performance that was unpredictable. “Shifting to DocumentDB was an option, as we are already on AWS, but it would have been expensive from a development perspective because we would have to change how our application operates. It would have meant making changes to how the applications run and where they store data for performance, where the characteristics are more predictable. There is not a straight comparison between MongoDB and DocumentDB – there are some things that DocumentDB handles very well, and others that don’t match what we need in terms of performance. There would have been a development cost investment, but also a lost opportunity cost of leveraging our software engineers to do a database transformation as opposed to building product and functionality that our customers want,” explained Carr. “In comparison, Percona Server for MongoDB is fully compatible with our existing applications, and the cost is substantially lower, particularly for backup.”
Working with Percona
After choosing Percona Server for MongoDB, Carr and his team planned the migration. This included shifting from MongoDB Enterprise and moving the company’s backup to Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM). This is a fully open source backup solution for MongoDB that supports consistent backups of MongoDB clusters, including sharded environments. It provides logical, physical, incremental, selective and snapshot backups and restores for users.
With PBM, Carr and his team were able to achieve the same backup resilience and reliability at a fraction of the price that their renewal would have been. Carr worked with Percona’s Professional Services team to support the migration and PBM implementation, which made the migration process easier and faster. “Working with Percona, we got the technology that we needed to support our operations and we benefitted from the great experience and response that the Professional Services team delivered too. They know the technology inside out, and they were able to support us during the whole process. On the support side, we don’t often need assistance, but we know Percona is there and the team will be super efficient and responsive,” said Carr.