Uscreen | A Crunchy Case Study

Uscreen uses Crunchy Bridge with GKE for Optimal Database Price to Performance

in monthly costs
$0 increase
performance increase
2x CPU

A fully managed database for GKE

This case study has a special illustrated version

Mikhail's daughter made an illustrated representation of this case study that you won't want to miss.

View Illustrated Version

Uscreen is a video monetization and distribution platform for content creators. The SRE and database team at Uscreen.tv set out to move from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They successfully moved their application and were very happy with the results overall. On the database end, they could see that latency between Heroku’s AWS machines and GKE was significant.

Uscreen knew they needed to migrate the database away from Heroku. They looked at Google’s Cloud SQL, Aiven, and Crunchy Bridge since they all deploy managed Postgres on top of Google Cloud.

The other providers do like a thousand things. All Crunchy does is Postgres.

Mikhail ShirkovSite Reliability Engineer, Uscreen

Uscreen had a huge database to move, nearly half a terabyte, and were struggling with the size of the migration. They were facing potentially a day or more of downtime to get the database migrated to a new platform.

Uscreen reached out to Crunchy about migration options and were thrilled to learn about a no downtime migration using existing backups.

Both GCP and Aiven had some tooling to help with migrations but nothing like Crunchy Bridge. The killer feature with Crunchy is the migration. It's instantaneous.

Mikhail ShirkovSite Reliability Engineer, Uscreen

By streaming backups straight into Crunchy, Uscreen was able to complete a migration with less than 40 minutes of downtime.

Uscreen reports that after moving to Crunchy Bridge they are spending the same amount on database services and they’re thrilled about the price to performance.

  • They now have 2x the CPU
  • They do less database maintenance than ever

Uscreen’s favorite thing about Crunchy Data is the support.

We get any help that we want. From basic technical questions to more advanced topics. Crunchy always replies instantaneously. We also love that Crunchy contributes directly to Postgres. That’s important to us too.

Mikhail ShirkovSite Reliability Engineer, Uscreen

The Uscreen team now feels confident in growing their application and database. “All of our pain is solved. We’re in a safe place now and confident in growing our customer base.” said Mikhail.