Akna lifts MySQL performance by 1,000X and cuts costs by 60% with Oracle Cloud

For more than 15 years, Akna Tecnologia da Informação has provided email marketing and ecommerce solutions to Brazilian clients built on MySQL Community Edition databases in the IBM Cloud. When the company, due to its strengths in email marketing and SMS marketing, was acquired by Hi Platform, it needed more reliability and database performance as it scaled for growth.

The Galera Cluster solution for multimaster replication was not giving sufficient availability and costs were escalating. Plus, overall performance was sluggish under IBM Cloud. Furthermore, Akna had been providing many microservices for clients using complex Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and needed to ensure business continuity.

As a longtime user of Oracle technologies, Akna found peace of mind in moving to Oracle MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The company gained greater performance and didn't have to worry about managing clusters or servers. With benchmarking and pilots indicating significantly lower costs, as well as with Oracle Support offering hands-on advice, Akna decided that OCI was the way forward to support growth in its digital marketing business.

Akna plans to leverage the built-in high-performance, in-memory query accelerator for One MySQL Database service for transactions, analytics, and machine learning (ML)  without the complexity, latency, and cost of extract, transform, and load (ETL) duplication.

After switching from IBM to OCI, Akna saw a 60% reduction in total cost of ownership. Performance gains were 1,000X higher, especially in sending email marketing campaigns and integrating with client solutions through Oracle APIs.

With Oracle APIs, the number of customers waiting in a queue during peak marketing campaigns dropped from a dozen under IBM Cloud to just two with OCI, a notable 6X gain for Akna, which realized immediate customer satisfaction.

OCI provided 10.8% more performance than IBM Cloud and 6X more efficiency. Storage performance also scored higher in OCI. Using OCI Flexible Load Balancing, the company has the necessary scalability to handle multiple client workloads in a multitenant environment.

By hosting the application in the Oracle São Paulo data center, Akna experienced 5.8 times lower latency than on IBM Cloud’s Dallas facility, resulting in a significant improvement in Virtual Private Network (VPN) access for its customers.

For backup and storage, Akna began moving to OCI Object Storage while continuing to use mysqldump for automatic backup of MySQL instances.

To meet Brazil’s Federal Data Privacy Law, Akna is using Oracle Cloud Guard for data protection and vulnerability analysis, as a shield against ransomware and other cyberthreats.

Because every large company served by Akna expects compliance reports, Akna’s use of OCI safeguard tools has benefited its security team. The company has successfully implemented Oracle Web Application Firewall, helping to protect applications from malicious internet traffic.

The cloud marketer is now decomposing its monolith application into more understandable components using Oracle microservices. To break up the app it will use OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE), reducing the time and cost to build modern cloud native applications. DevOps teams also plan to use Oracle Cloud functions, the serverless platform that lets them create, run, and scale applications without managing any infrastructure.

This migration from MySQL Community on-premises to MySQL HeatWave on OCI involved Akna's technical team, security team, infrastructure team, and development team, with Oracle specialists advising on lifting the 5 terabytes of data from three clusters into OCI. The solution was to move the data via MySQL Shell’s dump loading directly into OCI’s Object Storage bucket. When the time came to upload the instance, Oracle Object Storage automatically imported the data into MySQL Enterprise Edition running in Oracle Cloud.