Instaclustr

SiteMinder Partners with Instaclustr to Accelerate its Growth Plans for Hotels Worldwide

2022

Unlocking Scale with Open-Source Databases

The accelerated growth opportunities associated with open-source databases are a compelling draw for businesses. But many small- to medium-sized companies are reluctant to adopt open-source technologies because of the steep learning curve required and the lack of highly skilled talent needed to manage them. Unlike licensed databases, open-source alternatives come with no guarantees or help-desk professionals at the ready.

Instaclustr is an Australian software vendor with a mission to provide the highest level of scale and reliability to its B2B customers through open-source technology. Established in 2013, the software vendor offers a managed platform for open-source technologies such as Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Redis, and Amazon OpenSearch Service. Instaclustr combines a complete data infrastructure environment with hands-on technology expertise for implementing and managing customers’ open-source technologies on their behalf.

Customers hail from across the globe, with the highest concentration in the United States, and a growing presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

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The cloud operations of AWS are world-class, which makes it much easier to meet compliance requirements across the globe.”

Tim Palmer
APAC Sales Director, Instaclustr

Ensuring A Low Latency, Global Coverage

Instaclustr’s solution gears towards demanding, globally scalable workloads. It chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud foundation due to the robustness of the platform and the AWS Regions and Availability Zones available for deployment. By deploying across three Availability Zones by default, Instaclustr’s solutions are inherently fault tolerant.

“The ability for us to spin up in the AWS Regions our customers are running in is crucial because the type of workloads that we support need to be always on, with low latency,” explains Tim Palmer, APAC sales director for Instaclustr. Instaclustr is currently managing about 2.5 PB of data for customers, ranging from startups to enterprises operating between 3 to 500-node data clusters. Data is stored on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backups. Its managed platform solution comes with an uptime service level agreement that varies by contract, but averages about 99.99 percent. Customers benefit from sub-10 millisecond latency for data queries.

Supporting SiteMinder to Scale

One of the standard use cases for Instaclustr is when businesses look to scale rapidly. This was the case for SiteMinder, an open hotel commerce platform used by over 32,000 hotels in 150 countries globally. SiteMinder was leveraging MySQL running on Amazon EC2 instances, but its engineers were hitting the manual scaling limits of a relational database structure. They were spending a lot of time on engineering efforts at the expense of application-level innovation, which had a big impact on its growing customer base.  

SiteMinder identified Apache Cassandra as the best-fit open-source NoSQL technology to complement its MySQL databases, in light of growing data volumes. It then engaged Instaclustr to assist with data model design and planning to incorporate distributed database infrastructure into its technology stack.

Based on the success of the initial engagement, SiteMinder continues to use Instaclustr’s managed platform with 24x7 database support. “Working with Instaclustr and capitalizing on their operational experience and expertise was key to our successful adoption of Apache Cassandra to handle high data volumes that SiteMinder processes,” says Mike Rogers, chief technology officer at SiteMinder.

Maximum Flexibility with Deployments in AWS

It took just one month for Cassandra to be utilized in production applications. In addition to reduced management overheads and greater scalability, faster time-to-market has been a key benefit for SiteMinder’s business. 

Instaclustr deployed its solution directly on SiteMinder’s AWS infrastructure, a configuration that offers maximum flexibility. Nearly 80 percent of Instaclustr’s customers are already running on AWS.

“We have more features on AWS because most of our customers run on the same platform. Most of our development efforts go into building features that are compatible with AWS,” Palmer says. Instaclustr’s solutions are all SOC 2 compliant, and customers deploying on AWS can also comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).

Benefiting from A Wealth of Expertise

By choosing Instaclustr’s managed service solution, SiteMinder has effectively de-risked the maintenance challenges that often come with open-source conversion. “Running open-source technology by yourself is very complex. If you don’t have dedicated teams with experience managing open source at scale, things can get out of hand very quickly,” Palmer relates.

SiteMinder hasn’t hired additional staff to run Cassandra in production and benefits from issue-resolution response SLAs between 15–20 minutes with Instaclustr’s managed solution. While savings can vary, Instaclustr estimates its customers have an 80 percent lower TCO for databases using its managed services versus migrating and managing their own open-source database infrastructure.

“Because we operate thousands of clusters on our customers’ behalf, we’ve seen everything that can go wrong. Our customers tap into a wealth of expertise with our solution, and we ensure constant transaction monitoring to get ahead of any issues that could impact production or cause downtime,” Palmer adds.

More Time for Innovation and Expansion

With Cassandra database administration now offloaded to Instaclustr, SiteMinder has been able to focus on introducing innovative new products such as its Multi-Property platform, designed to increase the efficiency and maximize the growth opportunities of hotel groups and chains.

Instaclustr, meanwhile, is also gearing up for scale. It recently acquired credativ, a global consulting company, to enrich its PostgreSQL expertise and is seeking to expand its presence in Europe and Asia. “The cloud operations of AWS are world-class, which makes it much easier to meet compliance requirements across the globe,” concludes Palmer.

To Learn More


About Instaclustr

Instaclustr helps organizations deliver applications at scale by managing their open-source data infrastructure. With its managed service platform, customers benefit from 24x7 support and 99.99% availability for a range of databases such as Apache Cassandra.

Benefits of AWS

  • Achieves 99.99% or higher uptime
  • Lowers customers’ TCO for database administration by 80%
  • Manages data clusters up to 500 nodes
  • Delivers sub-10 millisecond latency for customers in 21 AWS Regions
  • Complies with PCI DSS, SOC 2
  • Responds to customer concerns within 15–20 minutes

AWS Services Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 475 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload. 

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Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more. 

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Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

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