ClusterControl saves leading APAC payment gateway service provider DBAs a day per month
ClusterControl has helped a stressed core ops team move from complex, inefficient operations to straightforward, reliable workflows through intelligent automation and responsive support.
A leading APAC payment gateway service provider delivers secure, scalable payment solutions for businesses of all sizes. Renowned for its reliability, security, and ease of use, this provider supports online stores, mobile businesses, and organizations requiring robust recurring billing solutions.
Supporting this mission-critical payment infrastructure is the Platforms and Automation team, responsible for the administration and maintenance of the company’s server fleet, business databases, and automation of code pipelines across multiple data centers. Their mandate is to ensure continuous service delivery in a regulated, always-on environment.
Challenge
This APAC payment gateway’s business depends on absolute reliability, fault tolerance, and compliance with the strict standards required in the payments industry, including PCI DSS. As transaction volumes continue to grow and regulatory requirements intensify, so has the company’s core needs around availability, operational efficiency, and compliance:
- High availability and fault tolerance: Payment processing workloads require zero downtime and immediate failover capabilities across geographically distributed sites.
- Operational efficiency: With a small, specialized team with a large mandate, they need a solution that simplifies complex database operations.
- Compliance: All solutions must maintain or enhance PCI compliance.
When the current team joined, the decision to use ClusterControl had already been made by previous leadership and prior approaches to achieving high availability, failover, and observability are unknown, as the current team was not involved in earlier evaluations.
Solution: ClusterControl by Severalnines
Regardless, the team is heavily utilizing ClusterControl’s GUI for centralized cluster node management and recovery, real-time performance monitoring and alerting and streamlined user and backup management for their MariaDB clusters. The implementation details are as follows:
Implementation details
Cluster Topology: 5 MariaDB Galera clustered primary nodes and 1 read-only MariaDB replication node, distributed across two geographically separate data centers.
- Operational Workflow:
- Backups and reporting operations are offloaded to the read-only replica, ensuring transactional workloads remain unaffected.
- Real-time monitoring, alerting, and GUI-based management enable proactive response to incidents.
- Backups and reporting operations are offloaded to the read-only replica, ensuring transactional workloads remain unaffected.
The Platforms and Automation team engages Severalnines technical support for general guidance and whenever incidents arise. The support engineering team has consistently been timely and effective, contributing to stable operations and confidence in the platform.
In fact, a Senior DBA stated that, on the rare occasion an incident does occur, they are able to respond to and resolve it “half a day quicker” by using ClusterControl to efficiently gather the logs and collaborating with the responsive support engineering staff to analyze them.
Outcomes
Although previous management selected ClusterControl, the current team is satisfied with the platform and has experienced multiple benefits that have produced quantifiable results:
- Performance optimization: ClusterControl’s monitoring enabled identification and resolution of resource-intensive queries, resulting in reduced system load and improved application performance.
- Operational efficiency: The intuitive GUI has significantly reduced routine database administration, backup oversight, and incident response overhead, saving them “at least a day’s worth of effort per month.”
- Improved focus: Automated alerting and monitoring allow the team to focus on broader engineering initiatives, reducing the need for manual system checks.
“Having ClusterControl to monitor and alert on our database instances allows us to concentrate on other tasks and duties with the confidence that we will get notified promptly when necessary. The intuitive GUI gives us a unified view of our environment, dramatically simplifying administration and incident response.”
Platforms and Automation Manager
The benefits have not only been quantifiable; their daily operational life has been made much less stressful. Maintenance and incident handling are now more straightforward, and they now have a clear, actionable view into critical system information and operations like backups.
Wrapping up
The company’s architecture is currently under review as it evaluates the best path forward to meet evolving business and technical requirements. It remains committed to open-source technologies for their flexibility, feature richness, and cost-effectiveness. Future plans for ClusterControl and related database infrastructure will be aligned with the outcome of this ongoing review.
Looking to improve your on-prem or hybrid data ops’ reliability? Explore ClusterControl and install it in 10 minutes to launch your first cluster with our 30-day free trial today!
Summary
Reduced operational overhead
Their DBAs estimate that they get a day per month back thanks to ClusterControl’s GUI and automation suite.
Quantifiable application improvements
The platform’s observability suite enabled them to resolve resource-intensive queries, improving app performance.
Improved operational quality of life
ClusterControl and the support team have made maintenance and incident handling much more straightforward.
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