Moneytree is a Japanese financial data platform that aggregates data across users' financial institutions. It serves both individuals and small to medium-sized businesses with fine-grained control over how their data is shared with their financial services, tax preparers and accountants.
Moneytree’s application stack runs on Postgres and as the company grew, they began to hit scaling issues. Their need for additional storage was forcing them to advance to increasingly expensive tiers on their previous provider, but they didn’t need the additional compute capability. They needed a new Postgres vendor and reached out to Crunchy Data after talking to friends and consultants in the industry.
Crunchy Data has a reputation for supporting giant Postgres clusters at the enterprise level, so when we came across their managed, cloud-native option, Crunchy Bridge, we were excited to check it out.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
Crunchy Data’s reputation in enterprise work and PostgreSQL committers was a great fit for Moneytree’s security and privacy-focused needs. Based on reputation, they were confident Crunchy Bridge would meet their high standards.
Why not RDS or Amazon Aurora?
Moneytree evaluated both Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Serverless first, but neither was a good fit.
Amazon Aurora just didn’t fit the load profile of Moneytree’s database. As a financial data aggregation service, Moneytree runs a write-heavy workload, and that would mean additional cost on Aurora.
Aurora Serverless seemed promising at first, but after digging deeper, we realized it would cost more than twice what we were already paying.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
For Amazon RDS, Moneytree was more concerned about the level of database administration they would need to successfully migrate and operate the database.
Crunchy Data offered us hands-on support with our migration, and would provide an engineer who could be on the call with our engineers as they prepared for and executed the cutover. This included key data integrity checks, a vital concern in our line of business. With Amazon RDS, we would have needed to invest more time and energy into training our engineers to take on the additional burden of running a database for ourselves.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
The hands-on support Crunchy Data provided was later essential to the migration’s success.
Migration Support
Migrations of this scale are rare and risky. There’s customer-facing downtime, and it's a significant, time-consuming project for the team. Moneytree wanted guidance through this transition, and Crunchy Data had experience in spades.
We have a talented engineering team, but we don’t move databases of this size often. Crunchy Data does. Having an experienced partner who could handle hosting and help us through the migration was a huge benefit for us.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
A key goal was to minimize downtime during the cutover. Moneytree has a large customer base including some of the biggest banks in Japan, and even short disruptions require planning and notice.
We were running on an older version of Postgres, so we were also looking at upgrading versions during the migration. Despite this, we needed to minimize downtime. It’s disruptive to our users. We had to do it once, do it quickly, and do it right
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
The Crunchy Bridge team supported Moneytree with multiple dry runs and simulations to nail down the timing. During some of the testing, Moneytree faced data integrity issues with the data being staged for the migration.
During our pre-flight test we ran into some data integrity issues. Our team can operate a database, but they aren’t database experts. This was completely new to us. John from Crunchy Bridge’s support team took the problem away and after a few days of grinding away, he had a solution. This is the real value of Crunchy Bridge, the expertise of their support team. Without it, we would have been blocked for weeks.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
The support Moneytree received from Crunchy Bridge, including a thorough testing plan and hands-on collaboration during the migration, made the migration a great success. Everyone on both teams understood each of the steps and how long it would take. They ended up with a total of 30 minutes of downtime, most of which were spent on data integrity checks. The actual downtime between operational databases was just a few minutes.
Collaboration with the Crunchy Bridge support team
Moneytree has a thriving collaboration with the Crunchy Data team. After successfully migrating the production database with minimal downtime, they have tackled other database issues as well. Moneytree reports a level of mutual professionalism that built a significant camaraderie, trust, and confidence that their database was in safe hands.
The Crunchy team has deep technical expertise and deeply respects the teams they’re working with. We didn’t have to explain ourselves twice. They didn’t assume some minor user error. We didn’t have to escalate through first-response agents – we always had experts. Their advice is always thoughtful, thorough, and deeply helpful for our team.
James SimpsonEngineering Manager of LINK Platform, Moneytree
Moneytree’s migration to Crunchy Bridge highlights how critical hands-on support and technical collaboration are in a successful database transition. With Crunchy Data, they found a trusted partner who not only understood Postgres at scale but also respected their team’s goals and approach.