The challenge
In the competitive world of online retail, helping customers save on their shopping with cash back can be the difference between making and losing a sale. At the same time, providing coupons for purchases can be an effective way to build a long-term relationship. Formed in 2003, CouponCabin provides customers with online coupon codes from American retailers. The site also offers printable coupons for local businesses and groceries, daily deal aggregation and product recommendations. CouponCabin launched its combined coupon and cash back service in 2014, linking purchases online for efficient matching and payback tracing. Since then, it has grown to work with more than 6,000 retailers. It also differentiates itself by focusing on speed of service, paying back up to 70 percent faster than its competitors.
This approach requires fast and efficient infrastructure that can cope with potentially huge numbers of transactions every minute. To support its critical applications, CouponCabin uses PostgreSQL as its database of choice. However, the company’s developers faced a challenge - the level of management and support time required around monitoring and backup were significant, affecting the ability to keep up with their goals to create new customer value or add software features. Alongside this ongoing management, the team also had to migrate to the next version of PostgreSQL. Head of Technology at CouponCabin, Thomas Stultz, decided to look for a way to solve all these potential problems.
The solution
Stultz saw that the Engineering team at CouponCabin wanted to reduce the operational overhead for the team around keeping its databases operating at peak efficiency, but did not want to hand full responsibility to a managed service provider that would take away some of the insight that the team had into database infrastructure performance. CouponCabin has a data-intensive business and relies on its PostgreSQL instances to operate, so getting access to deep PostgreSQL knowledge as well as delivering full backups, disaster recovery and migration tasks was essential.
Stultz chose Percona as the company’s partner for database performance and visibility. Percona Managed Services offers hands-on database services and administration professionals that monitor customer infrastructure around the clock to ensure all database environments are running smoothly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. At the same time, Stultz engaged with Percona Consulting for recommendations around database performance improvements.
CouponCabin worked with Percona to achieve its necessary performance and reliability levels for its eleven PostgreSQL database instances without giving up control and insights. With Percona, CouponCabin also had access to support resources to plan its migration. Working with Percona’s consulting team, the two companies’ teams worked together to upgrade the company’s key PostgreSQL databases from version 13 to version 14.
Working with Percona
The Percona team created a detailed plan for the migration process that provided reassurance to Stultz and CouponCabin. During the migration, Percona provided additional suggestions to improve performance that were beyond the scope of the migration including several missing indexes. The overall migration project itself went smoothly and delivered beyond the Engineering team’s expectations with additional performance gains.
Percona helps the CouponCabin Engineering team to be hands-on, able to debug issues or check the health of systems, while the Percona Managed Services team takes care of tasks like maintenance and backups. On top of this, Percona provides regular review meetings with the CouponCabin team that deliver updates on the health of the company’s databases around performance insights, uptime and consistency. These review meetings proactively flag any increases in replication time or idle queries, and provide recommendations and fixes immediately when they are needed, rather than requiring the CouponCabin Engineering team to make trade-offs and delay upkeep.
Looking ahead, CouponCabin will rely on its databases heavily to craft insights into the company’s inventory campaigns with retailers, with schema changes happening on a weekly basis. To make this process easier, the CouponCabin Engineering team has created a roadmap that includes large overhauls of its base schemas with Percona creating the safe and dependable migration plans and solutions to deliver on those goals. CouponCabin also plans to upgrade its datacenter network as well to support different geo-locations and deployments in the cloud. This will be another major project that Percona will support CouponCabin to achieve.
Our Engineering team develops new features constantly to deliver what customers want, but these all put additional queries and writing to our databases. With Percona, the team feels comfortable shipping features as they know Percona is monitoring for any changes in performance. Downtime in all of our environments is practically non-existent since Percona has been managing our database infrastructure. We rely heavily on a very healthy development and staging environment that Percona treats as a first-class piece of the platform, so losing hours to downtime in the lower environments is never a worry for us.
Thomas Stultz
Head of Technology, CouponCabin
CouponCabin wanted to improve its database performance, availability and reliability, but did not want to cede control to a managed service provider or over-invest in dedicated database administration resources. CouponCabin worked with Percona to improve performance, cut down on potential downtime and streamline developer work around database infrastructure.
The project delivered the following results:
✓ Improved availability for the company’s critical database instances
✓ Upgrade to PostgreSQL version 14 with substantial performance improvements
✓ Plan for long term datacenter and cloud migration as company database requirements grow
About CouponCabin
Founded in 2003, CouponCabin is an online hub for the best savings on the Internet and the first coupon site to pair coupons with cash back. The company launched its cash back program in 2014, offering shoppers the chance to combine promo codes that always work with the ability to earn cash back. Through strong cash back partnerships with over 6,000 of the most in-demand stores, CouponCabin offers industry-leading cash back rates and pays its members up to 70% faster than competitors.
Contact Us
To learn more about Percona’s services, contact us at +1-888-401-3401 in North America, +44 (203) 608-6727 in Europe, or sales@percona.com
