Singapore-based provider of eCommerce solutions boosts the online shopping experience using MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Introduction & Background
Kemana, a leading SaaS ISV, provides eCommerce solutions that help retail companies provide compelling shopping experiences, boost online sales, and increase revenue. The company develops, manages, and hosts omnichannel platforms that enable B2C and B2B customers to purchase goods and services via any device. It also ensures that inventory is available to fulfill every “click & collect” or “ship from store” order.
Kemana’s eCommerce solutions are powered by leading open source eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and Shopware and are designed to integrate with any backend enterprise system.
Business Challenges & Goals
Kemana’s challenge in providing flexible shopping cart systems is to maximize uptime, deliver fast response rates, and minimize costs.
Since its inception in 2015, Kemana deployed MySQL Community Edition, initially on premises and later through various cloud providers. But after eight years, with business expanding in Asia, the company found itself unable to scale and was burdened with manual processes that hampered product development.
To gain high performance, increase scalability, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its database platform, in 2022 Kemana began migrating all of its workloads to MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
By migrating to Oracle Cloud, Kemana experienced a 10X increase in performance and, thanks to OCI elastic scaling, an 8X reduction in monthly costs compared to its previous cloud provider.
The 10X performance increase from MySQL HeatWave’s massively parallel, high performance, in-memory query accelerator translated to online shoppers enjoying response times ranging from 20 to 40 milliseconds, compared to 200 to 300 milliseconds with previous cloud platforms.
Along with faster online user interaction, Kemana now onboards new online merchants within 15 minutes versus hours or days previously. Each merchant is provided with client-specific compartments and is ready to start handling user traffic almost immediately.
The development and operations (DevOps) team has shed manual processes by spinning up 60 staging environments for developing eCommerce strategy and new product testing, resulting in faster release cycles and improved operational efficiency. Using the OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes has allowed the team of more than 70 developers and designers to streamline the deployment and availability of critical applications.
Database monitoring is another task that has been automated by migrating to the new platform. By using MySQL Performance Monitoring to proactively identify and address performance issues in real time, Kemana has experienced reduced latency, faster response times, and overall enhanced user experience.
With the ability to scale up or down computing resources automatically, the company has experienced significant cost savings. OCI Resource Manager has given Kemana the means to scale resources based on actual demand for varying workloads, thus eliminating unnecessary expenditures on over-provisioned infrastructure and reducing TCO. OCI’s automated scaling and failover mechanisms ensure that Kemana’s services are highly available, which minimized downtime and improved overall system reliability.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
After testing its applications on MySQL HeatWave, Kemana was convinced of the improved operational efficiency, scalability, and reliability it would gain. A comprehensive cost analysis revealed that the TCO—including development and operational expenses—was competitive and within budget.
“MySQL HeatWave and OCI gave us a competitive advantage. We gained the ability to respond faster to market trends, deliver enhanced services to our customers, and stay ahead of competitors,” said Ishan Rakitha De Alwis.
Next Steps
By fully leveraging the capabilities of OCI, Kemana has created www.madrian.tech, its own cloud solutions platform offering cloud provisioning, data migration, IT security compliance and many other services.
“Our partnership with Oracle Cloud brings together our eCommerce competency and Oracle’s cutting-edge cloud technology to drive transformative results for our clients. With this partnership, we are equipped to deliver the highest quality solutions that will accelerate growth, enhance productivity, and elevate customer experience,” said Chris Benz.
“We have exciting future plans for collaborating with Oracle - a strategic roadmap covering brand expansion, e-Commerce optimization, scalable architecture, innovative technologies, and enhanced security,” Ishan Rakitha De Alwis added.