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Customer Success

SoundCloud used Pythian’s database support to unblock tech teams

Without Pythian, a capacity-strapped tech team couldn’t respond to their customers quickly enough.

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Overview

Industries

Media & Entertainment

Locations:

Berlin, Germany

SoundCloud relies on Pythian for their Cassandra expertise to optimize their database performance. Pythian is an extension of SoundCloud’s Production Engineering team. Partnering with Pythian has allowed SoundCloud’s teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Pythian and SoundCloud have a shared Slack channel to enable on-demand communication. Pythian has helped them implement a DataStax optimization report to provide SoundCloud with higher data availability.

What we did

Pythian improved the performance and stability of Cassandra through anti-entropy repairs, drastically improved internal latencies, and increased cluster availability using a DataStax optimization report.

  • Optimized the Cassandra database cluster performance. When the SoundCloud team implemented Cassandra Reaper, they faced several issues making the tool operational. The Pythian team stepped in, and now Cassandra anti-entropy repairs without any issues.
  • Enabled internal speed by improving tail read latencies. Pythian improved the read latencies on the 99th percentile from 250ms to 40ms. This allowed the SoundCloud team to provide internal customers the support they needed in a timely fashion.
  • Changed a Cassandra cluster from a single datacenter to a multi-datacenter topology. Pythian increased data availability for a Cassandra cluster by helping provision a new datacenter. They did this while adhering to strict topological constraints.
  • Helped backend teams configure consistency levels. Pythian also investigated the consistency levels in Cassandra. Pythian created a report explaining how the DataStax Java driver for Cassandra could be optimized while using the multi-cluster.
 
 
 

Technologies used 

  • MySQL
  • Apache Cassandra
  • Snitches
  • DataStax

Key Outcomes

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- SoundCloud's technical teams can focus on more strategic initiatives.
- SoundCloud has higher data availability after migrating from open-source Cassandra to DataStax.
- SoundCloud improved its database performance.