Aiven for MySQL wins for Paperlust

Paperlust, an Australian online retailer, turned to Aiven after facing scalability and stability issues. Read to find out how the problem was solved!

Highlights

  • Australian online shop faced scalability and performance issues and had a small team.
  • With Aiven for MySQL, performance issues were conquered and scalability is easy.
  • No more management overhead, not even downtime.

Overview

Paperlust was established in 2014 in Melbourne, Australia, to encourage regional artists and offer personalized paper products to customers who appreciate beautiful design.

Paperlust exists because the founders recognized a gap in the market.

“We grew weary of watching talented designers waste time pursuing clients as potential customers waded through countless websites, searching for excellent design goods,” says Alex Boston, Co-Founder of Paperlust. “Talent was present. There was a demand. It was just necessary to build a platform that made it simple for the two to interact.”

Paperlust adds new designs for sale daily to their continually-growing product selection, and their community is flourishing. Paperlust is a part of people’s lives throughout Australia and the world as they invite party guests, send thank you notes, decorate spaces, announce births and celebrate anniversaries with Paperlust products.

The challenge

At first, Paperlust configured their web shop on a single server that hosted both the applications and the databases. They soon outgrew this solution, though, as their user base expanded. Customers began to experience significant lag when using the site, leading to a poor customer experience. To alleviate performance issues, Paperlust decided to separate the applications and databases and moved their databases into a managed relational databases service.

This migration did not have the desired effect, and they had to move their database multiple times in efforts to conquer their performance problems. Each time this happened, they had to turn off the server and configure a new endpoint. This led to even more delays.

Waiting for an online shop for paper products to respond seems like a small thing, but it has big consequences for the company in question. Firstly, performance issues gradually reduce their site’s availability, leading to revenue loss and decline in customer trust.

Moreover, it’s wasting time internally. Development work grinds to a halt as the team waits for the server to run again. And this isn’t even taking into account the frustration it causes!

Paperlust were aware that they could tackle this issue by taking closer care of the database and adding some components. “But we thought it would add complexity to our stacks,” says Alex. “We didn’t really have a team to manage the infrastructure on a daily basis.

The solution

With Aiven, Paperlust has found the perfect partner to take care of their databases, while they continue to connect consumers with designers and artists with audiences. They were able to continue with MySQL®, which had been their initial choice as a simple database that the team could understand.

“From a technical perspective, Aiven allows us to use the same database endpoint regardless of any region changes or instance type changes,” says Alex. This makes the system flexible and extendable.

The outcome

With Aiven, Paperlust no longer has any performance worries. “It also minimizes our downtime due to region changes or instance-type changes,” Alex notes. “It gives us flexibility to change the database configuration as needed without worrying about downtime. Besides, we no longer have to call the dev team to simply change the endpoint.”

The development team is happy too, since it spares the team from infrastructure maintenance on a daily basis.

“We can use that time to improve other aspects of our application,” says Alex. “We’re saving considerably in terms of cost and time that would be needed for infrastructure management, while also getting other benefits from Aiven. One benefit that we especially like about Aiven is the zero downtime during management operations. We will take advantage of it as we grow by moving the region or instance type scaling.”

For the end users, Paperlust’s page loads much faster now, and customers can browse and purchase the designs more easily. And things that make the customers happy also benefit the company’s bottom line.

“I would absolutely recommend Aiven for any company that wants to make the scalability of its infrastructure much more effortless,” says Alex.

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