Justuno provides a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Platform that enables e-commerce sites to turn visitors into customers through personalized onsite messaging, intelligent cross-selling, and upselling. More than 188,000 (and counting) industry leading brands improve sales and the customer experience at the same time.

At the heart of the Justuno platform is visitor intelligence data, and there’s a lot of it. Justuno tracks between 30 and 50 data points per visitor–such as time on site, products viewed, and items added to the shopping cart–in order to create relevant and personalized experiences for visitors and help online retailers capture and convert leads faster than ever before.

Early database evolution

Founded in 2011, the Justuno team originally built its platform with an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server as its database. “I originally wrote the Justuno profile system on a single Microsoft SQL Server. That was great, until it wasn’t,” said said Travis Logan, CTO at Justuno.

The Justuno application is installed on tens of thousands of websites around the world; a multi-tenant application that previously relied on a single SQL Server. This database quickly became a single point of failure as the customer base grew. “Of course there’s a backup server, and we have our 30 minute incrementals, and we wouldn’t really lose much in the way of data or downtime, but it is downtime and it is data. So we needed something distributed, something that we expect to not ever have downtime,” explained Logan.

Over time, as Justuno’s business continued growing and the platform continued evolving, the team tried out additional databases such as Cassandra and CockroachDB for different use cases, with each presenting its own set of challenges.

“We moved our profile system to Cassandra, and that’s what whetted our appetite for distributed systems. But we found that Cassandra is not suited to handle large amounts of data per node very well. We had to really scale out horizontally with a bunch more nodes, just from a data standpoint. Then we realized, from a cost perspective, it wasn’t doing us any justice,” said Logan. To keep costs contained, the Justuno team ended up backing up and only storing the last three months of analytical data in Cassandra and data lake the remaining nine months elsewhere. Justuno also looked into migrating other workloads from Microsoft SQL Server to CockroachDB.

Then in 2019, Justuno started an initiative to rebuild its platform from the ground up using cloud infrastructure, specifically Google Cloud. Along with the move to GCP, the team also started looking for a new database or databases that could provide a high level of operations per second, deliver very low latency, and be a natural fit for its new cloud native architecture.

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