- in monthly costs
- 10% decrease
- in IOPS
- 40% increase
CareRev is a U.S. based application connecting nurses and healthcare staff with hospitals and health systems needing to hire local professionals. PostgreSQL is the backbone of the CareRev application and tooling. The CareRev DevOps and database team were growing and knew they wanted to migrate away from Heroku Postgres. They also knew the lineage of the Crunchy Bridge team from their experience in the Postgres community and decided to evaluate Crunchy along with the other Postgres tools on the market.
Crunchy compared to Amazon RDS
At first, CareRev thought the obvious choice was to migrate to Amazon RDS and they moved a few test applications and projects there. Then they decided to do a side by side comparison between Crunchy Bridge and RDS. CareRev started to work through additional testing on Crunchy and RDS, engaging both groups.
"From the start, Crunchy always had a plan and they always had an answer. That stood out between all of the other providers. With enough time and resources, we could put a plan together but we have systems to maintain. Crunchy gave us a lot of confidence in the transition plan."Rob SullivanCareRev
CareRev engineers really enjoyed the interface of Crunchy Bridge versus RDS. “We like the Bridge UI. It is simple, easy to use, and easy to find and review our database. Everything is consistent and clear for team members. It’s not the scavenger hunt you get with RDS,” said Gerard Lee, Software Engineer, at CareRev.
CareRev also wanted to be on the newest versions of Postgres, and while they were able to move their Bridge test machines to 15.2, they were still waiting for patches to come to RDS that had been out for several months.
"The approach to Postgres at Crunchy is beautiful simplicity. It's just Postgres and they’ve thought through what makes sense for developers. In our conversations with them, it was clear and collaborative. When working on RDS, we were working through a web of layers and incentives. It was confusing."Rob SullivanCareRev
When CareRev looked at the simplicity of management, cost compatibility, lag in version maintenance, and the level up in support, they decided to go with Crunchy Bridge for the Postgres services.
Cost Savings from Heroku
CareRev had been making heavy use of the Heroku low cost tier and scripted a lot of database builds and teardowns. They started experimenting with persistent databases instead and have found after running in production, they’re even saving spend with Crunchy Bridge. Their database costs are down more than 10% year over year. With the end of Heroku’s free tier, the cost savings nowadays would be even greater.
CareRev is also impressed by the performance they are getting out of the Crunchy Postgres disk. They ballpark performance at about a 40% increase in IOPS over their machines at Heroku.
They’ve also seen, in general, a reduction in the amount of database management time the team needs to undertake. Rob says, “Our main database can do so much more and we’re using a lot less resources.”
Every support ticket is valuable
"What a different support experience Crunchy is. Not only is it timely, it's informed, it's on topic. They just get what we’re talking about. Every support ticket is valuable. We’re encouraged to ask questions. We’re able to do so much more working with a partner who cares as much about data as we do."Rob SullivanCareRev
Amazon’s support experience for them took several days through a series of escalations. They felt like it was hard to be understood and more difficult to get straight to the answer.
Leveling Up on Postgres
The team has been able to do some new things with Postgres after moving to Crunchy Bridge.
"The Crunchy API has been great for us, it's really well maintained. The documentation is so good, we don’t need to maintain internal docs. We’ve added support for Crunchy’s API into our internal CLI to let our developers create test machines and it's been working really well."Gerard LeeCareRev
"What I love about working with Crunchy is that they make our database team look successful. We’re able to do things that a much larger team would do with Crunchy’s help."Rob SullivanCareRev
Rob and his team are making regular use of talking to support. If they work on a problem for a few hours, they stop and write a ticket. That kind of help has been instrumental in helping CareRev do more with their database, continue making improvements, and just learn more about PostgreSQL in general.
"One thing we love about Crunchy is all the community support through blogs and tutorials. We’re a small team working in production and we know we’re going to miss things. The content just gives us a baseline of where to work from. The Crunchy blog has been a powerful team building tool for us to get better at Postgres."Rob SullivanCareRev