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Why a major cable company switched from Amazon Aurora to CockroachDB

Last edited on December 22, 2020

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    With millions of customers to serve, a major cable company needed to build a virtual customer support agent to scale their customer requests. The app had to provide 24/7 help to users across the United States, and store metadata about customer conversations.

    The first version of the application was built on Amazon Aurora, in a single cloud region on the east coast of the United States. However, this deployment was vulnerable to failures, and when a networking failure in an AWS region knocked the entire service offline, the team realized that Aurora’s single-master architecture was not sufficient to attain the always-on customer experience they wanted. They needed to explore other options in hopes of migrating the app.

    >Here’s what they were looking for in a new database:

    • Always-on availability, because a 24/7 virtual agent can’t have downtime, even in the event of a failure.

    • Strong consistency, meaning the data should always be up to date, no matter what machine or data center handles a request

    • Low latency reads, from anywhere in the US

    They turned to CockroachDB for its strong resiliency, consistency, and low-latency reads. The end result is a multi-region deployment that can survive datacenter failures:

    telecom-topology-1024x659

    Head to the full case study for a graphic of the implementation pattern they’re using today, complete with how they’ve configured their cluster to ensure both local reads and ultimate survivability.

    geo-partitioning
    global
    hybrid-cloud
    Customer Stories
    case study
    aurora