The document discusses how Madisoft, a company that produces an education management platform called Nuvola, migrated their relational database infrastructure from self-managed MySQL instances to AWS RDS. Nuvola saw over 2 million active users and 400 million SQL queries per day, posing challenges for reliability, scaling, and maintenance of their previous infrastructure. By moving to AWS RDS, Madisoft gained automated backups, patching, monitoring, and scaling capabilities with 12 MySQL instances across multiple availability zones. The migration took only 50 minutes and saved significant costs and engineering time compared to their previous self-managed approach.

1. AWS RDS for your data (and your sleep)
Matteo Moretti
CTO @ Madisoft

2. Madisoft
Producer of Nuvola
Nuvola is a set of services (delivered as SaaS) to
digitalize and improve Italian school’s processes.
More than 1000 schools
(~ 15% of the market)
scuoladigitale.info

3. Nuvola
● > 2M active users
● > 1000 sql databases & > 500GB of relational data
● ~ 400M SQL queries / day (average)
● from few to ~ 200k sessions in 5 minutes at 8 a.m.
● 1M / week archived documents
Nuvola is a data-driven software

4. Relational data: how to?
● Handle very fast increasing growth
● Handle 400M sql queries / day
● High reliability
● Automatic backups
● Automatic os and db engine patches
● Scale based on traffic
● Continuously monitoring
● … add your own spec!

5. Old infrastructure
● 25 Mysql 5.6 instances
● Master - slave replication for high reliability: 50 instances
● Backups on slaves machines.
● Self-made monitoring and patching
It works but it’s fragile, error-prone and require a bunch of sysadmins
to keep it secure, up to date and working properly.
Tons of man hours ($$$)

6. AWS
...
is your
sysadmin

7. AWS RDS
● 12 MySQL 5.7 M4.large instances
● Multi AZ
● Rich API & Ansible as configuration management tool
● Automatic snapshots & backups
● Integrated monitoring and patching
● Easy to update (single click from to MySQL 5.6 to 5.7)

8. AWS RDS

9. Migration
How did we migrate?
https://www.slideshare.net/matteomoro8/nuvola-a-tale-of-migration-to-aws
It took ~ 50 minutes!

10. AWS RDS
● Db infrastructure a lot more reliable and efficient
● Everything automated
● Saved tons of man hours ($$$ and sleep hours)
Current and future steps
● Auto-scaling to better fit consumptions to real needs
● Give Aurora a try and do some benchmarks vs RDS MySQL

11. Madisoft
Thank you!
labs.madisoft.it
@madisoft