How to serve global IoT customers in the cloud – and secure SaaS revenue using Tungsten Clustering on cloud-based database services

SaaS providers typically rely on providing a quality service across multiple locations, with the best application and database availability. They tend to be growth-oriented and need to ensure that their business will always be available without having to worry about how their databases will achieve continuous operations.

Our customer for this use case is a global SaaS provider with an open data exchange platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) that has customers all over the globe.

This use case looks at how our customer migrated from a single region Amazon RDS deployment to a truly global, geo-distributed multi-master Tungsten Clustering database solution – a better, more scalable solution at a lower total cost. And how they did so without having to change their application, all the …

Thanks to everyone who joined us last week for this webinar hosted by Database Trends & Technologies (DBTA) and presented by Continuent CEO Eero Teerikorpi. The replay is now available to watch:

How to build a $10M SaaS business into a $6B Unicorn with MySQL and Continuent Tungsten

In this webinar, Eero walks us through the 10-year story of a marketing analytics SaaS, which grew with help from MySQL and Continuent from $10M to be a $6B behemoth: a real SaaS unicorn; and covers a number of related use cases also.

SaaS has emerged as the best way to deliver software, and SaaS solutions, at their best, …

In this fourth post in our MySQL Use Case Blog Series we look at a customer of ours who was able to grow their Saas business from tens of customers initially to thousands of enterprise customers once they achieved continuous MySQL operations with Continuent Tungsten.

This particular customer, based in California, develops and sells automation software for account-based marketing as well as other marketing services and products such as SEO and content marketing. They provide solutions tailored for large enterprises and fast-growing, small businesses alike covering all industry types from technology all the way to higher education.

So how did this fast growing marketing automation SaaS provider scale from tens of customers to thousands of enterprise customers using Tungsten Clustering (currently with 600+ MySQL instances)?

The Challenge

SaaS and other web applications are inherently 24/7/365 operations, thus they …

Those who build SaaS know that you’re actually providing an experience. You’re building long-term relationships and aiming for recurring revenue. Therefore, your product must be flexible, resilient, and consistent.

Many companies find it hard to take time, acquire the right ingredients, and design truly great software from the bottom-up. This is understandable given how fast the SaaS industry moves.

But firstly, who am I to be talking about this subject? My education was in Economics and Complex Systems, and I’ve been fortunate to gain exposure to various IT trends and tools working almost a decade mostly in Tech. I started interviewing customers at Continuent (majority SaaS) over five years ago, and I have listened to a number of …

With growing development and support costs as well as the need to maintain a sustainable business, it became apparent that maintaining the OSS release of Tungsten Replicator (TR) just wasn’t viable. Earlier this year we decided to close it down, instead focusing our efforts on improving and developing its commercial release whilst also growing our flagship commercial product, Tungsten Clustering.

For many businesses, Open Source Software (OSS) is still a very viable solution in many use cases, and I’m sure it will continue to be so for a long time, but I wanted to explore whether an OSS solution really is as free as the $0 price tag suggests.  In this blog I explore just that..

The hidden costs of OSS

Over the last few weeks I stumbled …

Great SaaS – starts with great software. My company has been working on this mission since 2004.

It took a few years to get our solution right – to offer a geo-distributed MySQL database backend for billion-dollar businesses. And it took a few more years to polish it.

Today, we continue to improve it day-in, day-out.

But there is no doubt the patience and perseverance pays off:

While the number of Tungsten-clustered databases in-production is in the thousands, we average only one (1) new support request per day, and, because of this, we provide an average response time less than three (3) minutes.

Not enough is said about the people and values behind great software; so that’s what I want to talk about here. Continuent is an agile, globally-distributed, remote team that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our software helps global enterprises …

We are honored to be ranked as one of the 10 fastest growing AWS solution providers to watch in the year 2018 by The Technology Headlines.

Read about our journey, the host of benefits for our customers, our exceptional team, and future roadmap in this Amazon Special Edition.

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

“Spark and Ignite can complement each other very well. Ignite can provide shared storage for Spark so state can be passed from one Spark application or job to another. Ignite can also be used to provide distributed SQL with indexing that accelerates Spark SQL by up to 1,000x.”–Nikita Ivanov.

I have interviewed Nikita Ivanov,CTO of GridGain.
Main topics of the interview are Apache Ignite, Apache Spark and MySQL, and how well they perform on big data analytics.

RVZ

Q1. What are the main technical challenges of SaaS development projects?

Nikita Ivanov: SaaS requires that the applications be highly responsive, reliable and web-scale. SaaS development projects face many of the same challenges as …

In this blog post, I’ll discuss MySQL sharding models, and how they apply to SaaS application environments.

MySQL is one of the most popular database technologies used to build many modern SaaS applications, ranging from simple productivity tools to business-critical applications for the financial and healthcare industries.

Pretty much any large scale SaaS application powered by MySQL uses sharding to scale. In this blog post, we will discuss sharding choices as they apply to these kinds of applications.

In MySQL, unlike in some more modern technologies such as MongoDB, there is no standard sharding implementation that the vast majority of applications …