Nifty's | A Crunchy Case Study

Nifty's Migrates to Crunchy Bridge for Superior Database Experience

average monthly costs
50% decrease
in burstable month costs
30% decrease

Seeking a burstable database

Nifty's is a Web3 platform that connects fans to what they love most through NFT-powered collectibles, experiences and rewards. Their easy-to-use interface enables fan communities to collect and trade digital art and other collectibles from their favorite brands and creators, like Sony, Warner Bros. and Discovery.

Nifty's marketplace, like many retail brands, often sees highly variable traffic. Therefore, the company needs to be able to scale up infrastructure resources during peak times, for instance, while working with Discovery to release exclusive Shark Card NFTs during its popular special programming of Shark Week. Nifty's DevOps team has to plan for several annual 1000% increases in site traffic.

Nifty's ran databases on Amazon Aurora for several years, which caused several unknowns and complications, the biggest one being the connection scaling. With this setup, they were unable to get a connection scaling application to run alongside the database in a way that didn't require manual intervention. They were also struggling with manual work to get things ramped up and down and the extra cost associated with leaving things at burstable usage settings.

After researching a number of services on the market, the Nifty’s team was most impressed with the Crunchy Bridge team and our approach to solving problems. The opportunity to save on cost while gaining a superior database experience also helped in the decision making process. “I don't know if I’ll manage a database again. It's way easier to click a few buttons and run stuff on Crunchy,” said Matthew Bond, Nifty's Software Engineer.

Scaling made simple

Nifty's began exploring the advantages of Crunchy Bridge, including a deep dive into our connection pooling, managed inside the provision and managed by the pg_Bouncer tool. In testing, they realized this feature would solve a lot of the complexities in managing an external connection pooler for the database.

Nifty's worked with Crunchy Bridge support to solve scaling challenges and a number of other solutions. With Crunchy Bridge’s read replica tools, Nifty’s gained flexibility in managing the size of its database infrastructure. With some additional external queueing and the additional read replicas, Nifty's is now getting bigger performance from Postgres. “The performance we get out of it is way bigger,” said Matthew. Nifty's has worked closely with the Bridge support team and has been impressed with the experience.

I have opened so many support tickets, little questions, small curiosities. The team has been super responsive and helpful. There hasn't been something they couldn't help me with.

Matthew BondNifty's Software Engineer

Nifty's has also taken advantage of having a real superuser connection to Postgres. The team used to run into lockout situations due to load and could not kill their own tasks. Now, thanks to the Crunchy Bridge’s superuser connection, that’s no longer a worry.

The Crunchy Bridge UI also lets Nifty's resize anytime they need more resources. A new machine is created behind the scenes and failover to the larger instance is automated.

Uptime has gone up during high traffic periods. We’re seeing better performance and lower costs. Stakeholders are happier and the devops team is really happy with the move to Crunchy.

Matthew BondNifty's Software Engineer

Crunchy Bridge Full Managed Postgres

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