No-downtime migration and RDS SQL Server HA/DR on AWS

Case Study - RDS SQL Server Migration & HA/DR on AWS

Nimble, Australia’s hassle-free cash loans provider, leverages CloudBasic RDS Multi-AR for RDS SQL Server Migration and HA/DR on AWS

Nimble, an Australian short term cash loans provider, was launched in 2005 with the mission to offer a simple and truly stress-free way for people to borrow money. With its straight forward process, and facilitated by smart technology, the startup grew into one of the well-known credit providers in the country. With the help of CloudBasic’s database server replication tools, the company optimized its IT infrastructure in the cloud and overcame the native AWS RDS Multi-AZ limitations.


The Client

Nimble is an Australian Fintech company with a technology solution that facilitates fast and easy consumer loans based on alternative data sources and straight through processing. Members can get short-term cash loans, up to $5,000, with a paperless application, decision within minutes 24/7, payments within the hour, and flexible repayment schedules.

What helps borrowers avoid the traditional paperwork and the inconvenient face-to-face meetings with bank loan officers is the smart technology built into Nimble’s platform. Its sophisticated decision making engine uses many data points to determine an applicant's suitability for an unsecured loan.

Since its inception Nimble has made over a million loans and has become one of the leading credit providers in the unsecured consumer credit industry in Australia.

For more information about Nimble visit https://www.nimble.com.au

 

The Case

As the Nimble platform continues to improve, and new members continue to join by the thousands, the security and availability of the company data became increasingly more important. With a large volume of transactions processed in real time 24/7, the IT infrastructure must be robust and efficient, employing high-availability and disaster recovery means.

Amazon’s on-demand cloud computing platform seemed the perfect fit for Nimble. AWS’s global infrastructure has several regions in the Asia-Pacific, with one conveniently located in Sydney. The Nimble technology team had a requirement to offload a portion of the primary SQL Server traffic but was unable to achieve this with AWS RDS for SQL Server out of the box.

 

The Solution

With CloudBasic RDS Multi-AR on AWS, first the company was able to seamlessly migrate terabyte size RDS SQL Server databases by maintaining continuous schema replication and keeping large amounts of data in sync over time, and second offload primary RDS SQL Server and create multiple readable-replicas for High Availability (HA).

CloudBasic’s RDS Multi-AR for SQL Server overcomes AWS RDS Multi-AZ limitations by creating fully accessible read-replicas, allowing offloading of primary DB servers by routing heavy read-traffic to the read-replicas.

The Results

With CloudBasic’s RDS/EC2 SQL Server replication solution, specifically designed for the cloud, Nimble was able to optimize its cloud infrastructure and benefit from features not available in a standard RDS Multi-AZ configuration on AWS.

The fully accessible read replicas can be used in a number of scenarios, from serving data to read heavy reporting applications, to a comprehensive Disaster Recovery scenario.

The Nimble Technology team has already deployed a multi-zone CloudBasic RDS Multi-AR based HA/DR solution. Going forward they have the option to deploy a multi-region, and even multi-cloud HA/DR solution.

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