From Massive to Multitudes: Database management after breaking a monolith
Abstract
With a customer base exceeding 16 million worldwide who entrust us with their finances and depend on our services for various transactions, Wise maintains an exceptionally low tolerance for downtime, measured in mere milliseconds, for critical databases. This demand has intensified following our migration to a microservices architecture, resulting in a significant increase in the number of databases, which now constitutes a vast fleet. Consequently, the effort required to ensure minimal downtime during essential database maintenance has become both immense and unsustainable.
We've made the strategic decision to leverage Temporal's capabilities to revolutionize our operations by enabling self-service and full automation, significantly boosting resilience in the process. While AWS database offering is designed for high availability, it can still experience downtime during minor or major upgrades. To address this, we are developing robust Temporal workflows that integrate with AWS and are designed to not only endure intermittent issues but also facilitate seamless rollback and recovery. By enhancing existing AWS database resilience, we minimize the need for human intervention, transforming the human role from an operator into a supervisor, and paving the way for an efficient self-service experience.
This talk explores the technical journey that made it possible. Dive into the database world and our architecture, gain insights into how we’re using Temporal, and take away actionable lessons for the challenges of today - and the opportunities of tomorrow.
About the Presenters
Samira is a senior software engineer at Wise, where she has been for 5.5 years. Currently, she is part of the Database Platform team, focusing on designing and developing tools for a vast database ecosystem. Samira was a core maintainer of PipelineWise and contributed to several open-source projects. Outside of work, Samira enjoys traveling, hiking through the British countryside, strength training, and stargazing whenever the London sky is clear.
Yash Vanzara is a platform engineer at Wise Payments Limited, specializing in cloud infrastructure automation. He has a proven track record of scaling infrastructure operations for Indian startups in the Quick Commerce and Fintech sectors. Outside of work, Yash is an avid gamer with over 2,000 hours of gameplay to his name.
