Challenge: Reduce Risk By Migrating Away from Heroku
Calibre builds performance monitoring tools for software teams to automate page testing, reporting and alerting for websites and applications. Calibre’s internal team is small but its client base is expansive across the U.S., Central Europe, and APAC including some of the largest media outlets on the web. At the core of Calibre’s service is accurate, fast, and reliable data. Calibre’s team used Heroku Postgres for 10 years and were a fan of its simplicity and feature set, which allowed the company to achieve a lot with a small team. However, Calibre became increasingly concerned about platform incidents and knew that migrating its database away from Heroku would reduce risk overall for their platform and customers.
As Heroku users, the Calibre team was used to having its database closely integrated into development processes, as they use database forks to test feature development. Extensive performance and regression testing is important and Calibre knew they would need a vendor that could offer the same features they were used to. So they sought to find today’s market leader in cloud Postgres and decided on Crunchy Bridge.
We wanted something at least as good as Heroku. We wanted best in class Postgres hosting and Crunchy was the clear choice.
Ben SchwarzFounder, Calibre Analytics
Crunchy Bridge vs Amazon RDS Evaluation
Calibre evaluated other providers including Amazon RDS and although the features could meet basic needs, Calibre was concerned about the level of support that would be available to them. They wanted top-tier expert support and a trusted team to work with in guiding them on best practices, running in production, and long term database management. After some experience with the Crunchy Data team, Calibre CEO and Founder Ben Schwarz said he was, “sure the people at Crunchy were total Postgres experts.”
Partnering with Crunchy saved Calibre from having to raise the level of time their internal team devoted to the database. And since costs were comparable between Bridge and RDS, there was a big win to be had with Crunchy’s support.
Outcome: A Minimal Downtime Migration and 20% Performance Improvement at the Same Cost
Calibre needed to minimize downtime and replicate data to its new host ahead of the change to ensure a quick failover. The Crunchy support team copied data to the Crunchy host ahead of the change, created a migration plan, and made a runsheet for migration day to ensure a smooth transition. “Any question I asked was answered. I felt confident we were working under best practices and I was reassured by the time and consideration taken to make sure we were speaking a common language,” said Ben. “This kind of support is something you don’t see elsewhere.”
In monitoring performance, the Calibre team was impressed to see that on similar hardware and cost, they’ve now reduced query time.
On some pretty crucial flows, we saw up to 20 percent faster performance times.
Ben SchwarzFounder, Calibre Analytics