Ecosmob helps Phone.com upgrade and modernize its high-performance database system on time, on budget, and without downtime or business impact.
Introduction
Phone.com is a modern work-from-anywhere solution for today’s agile, mobile, and always-on entrepreneurs and growing businesses.
It offers voice, video, text, call management, and collaboration features of an enterprise phone system, along with 24/7 support. Customer service is at the heart of the Phone.com mission.
Challenge
Phone.com’s network supports a very high volume of calls, and the company wanted to find an experienced partner who could help upgrade its open-source infrastructure and tackle some of the growth challenges facing the network.
One of Phone.com’s biggest challenges was its database. Phone.com used a very high-performance database architecture that was not native to its other network technologies. Critical to company operations and under constant use, it needed several improvements.
Specifically, the requirements were:
Migration to a Newer Database Version
Migrate from an older version of the database technology to a newer version.
Migration of Business-Critical Data
The older version contained over 2 TB of data, comprising 500 million documents, that needed to be migrated to the newer version without any data loss or corruption.
Compatibility Between Database Versions
The database had deprecated older storage engines and implemented new ones. This meant all the data had to be replicated from the older engine to the new engine.
Two-Way Replication
Establish active two-way replication between the older and newer versions.
Zero Downtime
Complete the migration process without downtime.
Failure Recovery
Ensure replication could survive failures and restart from the point where it failed.
Solution
Ecosmob started its collaboration with Phone.com based on its expertise in open-source telecommunications. Its expertise with Kamailio and other open-source technologies helped Phone.com upgrade and scale its network.
Addressing Database Compatibility
To solve compatibility problems, Ecosmob took a simple approach: read the create, update, and delete queries executed on the older version of the database and run them on the newer version, and vice versa.
This approach leveraged the abstraction provided by the NoSQL database and thereby addressed challenges caused by incompatibility between the two versions.
Implementing Event-Driven Data Replication
All replication was made resilient to failure. In the event of a failure, the process started from the point where it had stopped.
To achieve this, Ecosmob used an event-driven data streaming architecture with the following components:
Debezium Connector
It reads CRUD logs from the source database Oplog and pushes them to Kafka.
Kafka
It consumes CRUD logs produced by Debezium and queues them.
Python Consumer Script
It consumes CRUD operation logs from Kafka and executes them on the destination database.
Verifying Data Integrity
Ecosmob also developed verification scripts that sampled data from the older and newer versions of the database and verified its integrity.
Results
Ecosmob’s deep understanding of real-time communications and open-source telephony helped Phone.com upgrade its network to the latest version and migrate it to AWS on time, on budget, and with zero impact on business operations and services.
Some other benefits included:
2 TB of Data Migrated
Migrated 2 TB of data from the older engine to the newer engine without any data loss or corruption.
500 Million Critical Documents Replicated
Replicated 500 million critical documents efficiently from the older engine to the newer engine.
Zero Interruption to Customer Services
Finished the project on time, with zero interruption to services for customers.
Client Testimonial
“Upgrading our high volume network to the latest database technologies without any impact to our customer’s experience was no simple task, but Ecosmob helped us achieve it.”
