MODERNISE ABZORB’S DATABASE PLATFORM

Abzorb’s legacy database infrastructure was coming to end of life and poor performance impacted developer and user experience.

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Industry

Telecommunication

Location

West Yorkshire, England

Technologies

CentOS , Docker, Grafana , Prometheus, PostgreSQL

Overview

Abzorb is a rapidly growing progressive technology company specialising in telecommunications, for businesses both nationally and internationally.  Abzorb engaged with Dataxive to address two immediate issues – PostgreSQL version reaching end-of-life and performance issue impacting their developer and customer experiences.

The challenge

Abzorb had growing concerns about their legacy database infrastructure, monitoring, performance, maintenance, availability, and security. Abzorb’s legacy database infrastructure was built by a previous employee comprised of PostgreSQL 11.2 hosted on Cent OS 7 Docker containers. Monitoring was implemented using Prometheus and Grafana via separate containers in Docker Swarm implemented on 5x on-premises servers with 64GB RAM, 32 CPUs and SSD disks storage.

“Our immediate priorities at Abzorb are the End of life for PostgreSQL and performance of our app for developers and customers, especially as we are scaling and growing our customer base.”  - Ben Sugden, Head of Technology, Abzorb and Andrew Mein, Developer, Abzorb

Abzorb’s technical teams’ pivot of focus to database platform performance issues, alongside the businesses’ rapid growth, created development bottleneck and Abzorb’s CTO Ben Sugden recognized the need for complete review and revamp of database platform. He knew he needed a database partner with proficiency in PostgreSQL hosted on Docker Swarm to support their teams.

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To preserve the customer experience and enable Abzorb to focus on innovation and growth rather than spending extensive amount of time fire fighting legacy database platform issues, Dataxive jumped right in!

Dataxive’s expertise in building and managing containerised PostgreSQL databases and understanding of Docker were the perfect fit for Abzorb.

The solution

Dataxive began conducting a 360 Assessment starting with Database Inventory, Licensing, Database Security Assessment and a Database Health Check to identify where to provide strategic guidance on database infrastructure offering better performance, security, high availability and scalability whist mitigating any unexpected licensing costs. We used our specialized toolset, revealing essential areas within Abzorb's environment for infrastructure, design, configuration, maintenance, performance and security optimizations.

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Dataxive enables modernised database platform for Abzorb

Our complete 360 review of Abzorb's Containerised PostgreSQL environment,  Dataxive proposed a database platform strategy to  PostgreSQL version upgrade, improve performance, fortify security, fine-tune configurations, ensure availability and enable monitoring.

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PostgreSQL Version Upgrade and Mitigate Licensing Risk:  Our key suggestions included recreating vendor specific PostgreSQL image intended for development purposes by custom build new custom docker image for Abzorb using CentOS 7 and Open Source version of PostgreSQL 13 to mitigate unexpected licensing cost.

Database Performance:  Our key suggestions included performance optimisations through auto-vacuuming, partitioning, table bloat, indexing guidelines, and other configuration tweaks at Server, OS and database level.

Security best practices and compliance:  Dataxive advised on using latest version of software, regular updates, configuration settings, best practices, and toolsets to improve configuration and stability, helping Abzorb strengthen their security.

24/7 database monitoring:  We implemented database monitoring using Open Source tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and Postgres-exporter with custom metrics.

Database Maintenance and Availability:  Dataxive suggested measures for database backup, disaster recovery, high availability, fault tolerance and protection. We suggested increasing replica for improving high availability, configured monitoring to identify trends to make database configuration tweaks and trained developers.

Reduced costs: Our recommendations empowered Abzorb teams to concentrate on innovation, raising awareness of potential vulnerabilities while mitigating risk of unexpected costs.

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“Here at Abzorb, we believe that great communication is a key to success in any venture. In our experience, a lot can be lost in translation when working with technology consultancies. Working with Dataxive was a breath of fresh air. From the very first consultation, it was clear that Dataxive understood our needs at both strategic and technological levels. Throughout the project, Dataxive worked to our core principles, meeting their delivery commitments on time, and building a rapport with our own development team and senior stakeholders. At the end of the project, Dataxive left our developers with a much deeper understanding of the work that had been carried out. There are not many consultancies, that we have worked with, who put the effort in to explain the work they have carried out, in that way.  This has allowed our team to build upon the foundation Dataxive created for us.  I would happily recommend Dataxive to anyone looking for expertise in this field, and I look forward to working with Dataxive again in the future”

-  Ben Sugden, Head of Technology

Business outcomes

The business goal for Abzorb was stability of their data management platform alongside their rapid growth—all without compromising revenue or their developer’s and client’s experience. Our database gurus diligently developed custom docker images to mitigate licensing risk, enabled monitoring and offered advice allowing Abzorb to elevate their clients and developers experiences across the platform while enhancing operational data management processes. With the insights from Dataxive’s assessments, Abzorb had better visibility into their database environment, vulnerabilities, performance enhancements, and process improvements.