The top three benefits of Clustrix: Rapid development, database-wide ad hoc queries, and a team of experts.
Massive Media is the social media company behind the successful digital brands Netlog.com and Twoo.com. Over 80 million people have joined these sites on web and mobile in order to connect with nearby people instantly.
Pre-Clustrix
Massive Media’s first site was Netlog.com. Netlog has seen tremendous growth since its launch in 1999, particularly after 2003, and scaling the database was a continuous challenge. To scale Netlog’s database, Massive Media decided to partition, or shard, by language. But as the database continued to grow, this strategy proved insufficient and they were forced to shard by language and user ID, which required a very large in-house development effort to maintain and optimize the database layer. Additionally, the Netlog development team was limited in the types of queries they could efficiently execute in this architecture. It was a maintenance headache, so when Massive Media decided to build the dating site Twoo, Co-Founder and CTO Toon Coppens and the other engineers began looking for another way. That’s when they found Clustrix.
Deploying Clustrix
Massive Media built Twoo from the ground up with Clustrix in mind – assuming a single instance database. This design decision enabled very rapid development, and the site went from concept to launch in less than six months with less than 30 developers – from December 2010 to May 2011. The Twoo site experienced 1000+% growth from June to December 2011, and is now the sixth most popular dating site in the world. The Clustrix database scaled beautifully throughout this time. Massive Media’s cluster went from three to six to nine nodes seamlessly, without any interruption to users.
Clustrix provides three main benefits to Massive Media:
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Rapid development – engineers can focus on building the application rather than messing with back-end database issues.
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Database-wide ad hoc queries – Massive Media engineers can easily mine their live database for useful trends, a feature not possible in a sharded architecture.
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Access to a team of experts – Clustrix effectively expanded the Massive Media engineering team overnight, helping design and troubleshooting the data layer to keep it running smoothly.
Clustrix enabled Twoo to go from concept to launch in less than six months, and from zero to over four million users in less than one year. Massive Media can now focus its development resources where it matters the most – on a great user experience for its customers. Clustrix’s speed, scale, and simplicity paid off.
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