In the race to swiftly and accurately report on breaking news stories as they happen, today's journalists are increasingly turning to social media outlets for the latest updates. At the same time, this rise of content has also led to a growing need for data filtering and verification - beyond that of human capability.
Seeing the growing need, Austrian based startup x.news decided to take action. In late 2015 they began collaborating directly with leading journalists from around the globe and developed a cloud-based social listening & news platform tool to support the continuous 24/7/365 news cycle. Using the free MySQL Community Edition, x.news quickly crafted an intuitive and flexible SaaS solution capable of digesting the mass amounts of data and presenting only the most relevant and verifiable pieces of information, via a customizable dashboard.
As the platform continued to grow and initial development was nearing completion, x.news took a look at several possible enterprise platforms to support their go-to-market solution.
Challenges
- Reliability: Provide uncompromised 24x7x365 availability to journalists around the world enabling them to quickly and accurately report on breaking news
- Scalability: Avoid expensive scalability and growth bottlenecks, commonly associated with a rapidly growing platforms and services
- Universal Device Support: Operate seamlessly on a cloud-based environment across mobile, tablet, and computers
- Simplicity: Simplify administrative functions in order to focus on core competencies and product development
- Backup: Implement a redundancy system, allowing for automatic failover protection in case of catastrophic events
Results
- MySQL Replication: Achieved 99.998% uptime using a MySQL Source + Replca Replication environment
- MySQL High Availability: Eliminated scalability concerns by upgrading to MySQL Enterprise Edition enabling High Availability on x.news servers
- MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Considerably reduced overall administrative duty time by taking advantage of MySQL Enterprise Monitor to fine tune their environment
From Inception to Market Solution
Like many startups, keeping costs low without compromising flexibility, reliability, and market responsiveness was a must for x.news. With these goals in mind, the decision was made to upgrade from MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise Edition to support their public launch.
One additional realized benefit was that developers wasted no time or money on training, giving them more time to focus on their core competencies.
"To support our enterprise launch, our engineers implemented a robust backup system using MySQL Enterprise Backup to ensure that our customers would face zero reliability concerns." said Andreas Pongratz, CEO of x.news. "To date, x.news has achieved a 99.998% uptime window ensuring journalists never miss a story."