GaadiBazaar draws on over 25 years of vehicle finance expertise from Cholamandalam to connect vehicle buyers and sellers. Their mission is to enable hassle-free transactions at fair prices through buyer-seller interactions and end-to-end financial assistance.
This post shows you how GaadiBazaar, an online platform for buying and selling vehicles, achieved significant database cost savings by migrating to Amazon Aurora MySQL Compatible Edition Serverless.
Key drivers to optimize the database cost
GaadiBazaar encountered difficulties in managing its database costs on Amazon RDS due to the variable nature of its traffic patterns. With a standalone RDS for MySQL instance, scaling resources to accommodate the month-end/EMI collections cycle posed a significant challenge. Four read replicas were inadequate to handle the load efficiently, potentially leading to suboptimal customer experiences. In such instances, we had to manually increase the number of read replicas, which might resolve the issue temporarily. However, these additional replicas had to be removed once the traffic subsided.
GaadiBazaar recognized the need for an adaptive and scalable solution that could accommodate its growth trajectory while ensuring cost-effectiveness and prioritizing customer satisfaction in this dynamic environment. A significant aspect of migrating to Aurora was that it eliminated the need to redesign the existing database architecture, as Aurora supported multiple class types and offered easy deployment methods
While utilizing an RDS for MySQL instance, GaadiBazaar aimed to add additional replicas to accommodate the increased traffic during month-end periods. However, manually scaling up the resources based on monitoring and unexpected surges in traffic spikes proved to be a daunting and intricate challenge. For instance, GaadiBazaar was operating with 6 read replicas to fulfill the traffic and experiencing a significant rise in DB connections increasing from 600,000 in July 2023 to 800,000 in November 2023. IOPS increased from 150,000 in July 2023 to 200,000 in December 2023 resulting in a challenging scenario to balance the cost and application performance. The manual process was not only time-consuming but also susceptible to delays, potentially leading to degraded performance and an unsatisfactory user experience during critical periods of high demand. Additionally, each replica in the Amazon RDS setup had a dynamic endpoint, requiring a workaround to map these endpoints to GaadiBazaar’s application, further complicating the scaling process.
GaadiBazaar recognized the need for a more agile and responsive approach to handle the dynamic nature of their workloads effectively. The existing manual scaling process lacked the flexibility and responsiveness required to ensure seamless operations and maintain the desired level of customer satisfaction, prompting the exploration of alternative solutions that could provide a more automated and scalable approach.
The cost-optimization journey started with Aurora MySQL Serverless
To address the challenges of manual scaling and dynamic endpoints, GaadiBazaar collaborated with AWS to optimize their cloud environment. GaadiBazaar selected Amazon Aurora Serverless, a fully managed service that automatically scales capacity up and down based on real-time application demand. In December 2023, GaadiBazaar’s customer base stood at 3.3 million, and their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) traffic was 0.25 million. Initially, they started with 40 Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) as their utilization threshold to handle the application and SEO traffic. As the company experienced substantial growth, the traffic increased significantly. By March 2024, the customer count had risen to 3.8 million, and the SEO traffic had increased to 0.28 million. Despite this surge, Aurora was able to manage the traffic within the existing ACUs, significantly reducing costs during periods of low usage while maintaining high performance through the migration to Aurora Serverless.
After transitioning to an Aurora Serverless, GaadiBazaar found that handling traffic spikes became significantly more manageable due to Aurora Serverless ability to automatically scale up based on customer behavior on the platform. By configuring minimum and maximum specifications for the cluster, GaadiBazaar could support sudden surges in application usage without manual intervention.
With this optimized architecture, GaadiBazaar can now effortlessly handle over 3 million fluctuating users during the beginning and end of every month, ensuring a seamless and responsive experience even during periods of high demand.
The results
GaadiBazaar saw a 40% reduction in monthly Database spend post migrating to Aurora MySQL Serverless. With Aurora MySQL Serverless, GaadiBazaar now operates a cluster comprising one primary instance and four read replicas, with a flexible capacity range of up to 40 Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs). The following graph shows pre vs post migration cost comparison:
Conclusion
GaadiBazaar’s journey serves as a testament to the transformative power of embracing AWS serverless offerings to reinvent infrastructure. By migrating to Aurora MySQL Serverless, they not only achieved significant cost reductions but also gained the ability to support rapid growth seamlessly. Their success underscores the advantages of an AWS first approach, which enables organizations to unlock performance, scalability, and optimization. GaadiBazaar’s experience highlights the potential for businesses to thrive in dynamic environments by leveraging the serverless offerings provided by AWS.
Get started with Aurora today to cost-optimize your infrastructure.
About the authors
Shyam Soundar is a Solutions Architect at AWS with an extensive background in security, cost-optimization, and analytics offerings. Shyam works with enterprise customers to help them build and scale applications to achive their business outcomes with lower cost.
Suresh Subramani is the Senior AVP in charge of technology at Cholamandalam Investment & Finance Company Ltd. He spearheads the development and implementation of the company’s technology strategy, enabling the GaadiBazaar platform to evolve continually to meet the needs of its customers, dealers, and business stakeholders.
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