The outcome
With Aiven, Catalyst has seen a significant performance increase, and has been able to continue serving their customers without a glitch. Some of this is, of course, due to the increase in capacity, which Catalyst don’t hesitate to utilise: they know they can scale back at any time. With Aiven, capacity is easy and quick to adjust to match demand.
The flexibility for experimentation that was crucial for Catalyst has already yielded fruit. “There’s a tool called PGanalyze,” says Kim, “that you can add to your database to get better analytics. I’d tried to add it to Cloud SQL, but the system wouldn’t let me. With Aiven, I ran into the same permission restrictions, but the difference was in the approach that support took when I contacted them.”
At Aiven, the support staff tried their best to help, and when they couldn’t find a way they escalated the issue until a workaround was found.
“It wasn’t a 100% solution, but it was still PGanalyze running on Aiven and I was able to evaluate it. And we got there together with Aiven, instead of me digging through documentation and guessing.”
This experience highlights something that Kim deeply appreciates. “Catalyst is a customer success platform, so of course customer success is really important to us. I think Aiven really embodies customer success,” he says.
The unexpected benefit
One benefit that Catalyst had not been able to anticipate was the impact of Aiven’s easy usability. “The Aiven Console is just quite beautiful,” Kim says. “And I think it makes Aiven’s services approachable. Even application engineers who don’t deal with cloud providers often are confident in using it. They feel empowered to move a little bit faster and to do things themselves. And as a result, they’re more engaged and interested in their work.”
Future directions
For the future, Catalyst investigates moving to Kafka in order to evolve their data ingestion pipeline. At higher loads, Kafka looks to them like a good option to keep data streaming between different systems. It’s also easy to extend and adapt in a changing business environment.
Aiven steps up as an active and supportive partner for them on their path.