The fintech solutions provider increased competitiveness by implementing MySQL Enterprise Edition to enhance database availability and reduce operational costs.
Introduction & Background
Rapyd Financial Network Ltd. is a global fintech company that enables businesses to easily accept payments and access financial services across borders. The company’s all-in-one fintech-as-a-service solution provides customers with a unified API for collecting payments, issuing payouts, and managing accounts in any country or currency. The API supports over 900 payment methods including credit and debit cards, bank transfers, e-wallets, cash, and mobile payments. Rapyd built its platform with developers in mind, enabling customers to quickly and easily integrate services into their apps and websites.
Rapyd has experienced exponential growth since its founding in Tel Aviv in 2016, and currently has offices in Amsterdam, Singapore, Iceland, Dubai, Hong Kong, and the United States, employing more than 800 people. It recently added another company to its portfolio through acquisition, and expects to double its sales in the next year.
Business Challenges & Goals
Rapyd initially deployed its payments infrastructure solutions on Amazon RDS for MySQL as a managed database service. However, in addition to being expensive, this setup limited the company’s ability to optimize database performance in line with its dynamic business needs.
Rapyd’s engineers had little visibility and control of crucial database resources, including cache, buffer, temp-dir, and free memory, which prevented efficient management of the fintech platform’s infrastructure and limited its scalability.
Running a standalone database instance with no fault tolerance led to significant downtime when resolving issues or performing system upgrades and changes, negatively impacting client service level agreements (SLAs). Additionally, support services from AWS did not meet Rapyd’s expectations as they were not specialized in MySQL environments.
Rapyd also faced critical security challenges including a lack of database permissions, encryption, and masking—essential safeguards in the highly regulated and data-sensitive fintech industry.
Business Results & Metrics
Rapyd increased competitiveness, innovation, and growth capacity for its global payments infrastructure solution by deploying MySQL Enterprise Edition, to enhance database availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.
Rapyd boosted the reliability of its fintech services—a crucial industry deliverable—by increasing database durability with MySQL Enterprise Edition. By migrating from RDS as a standalone instance to an InnoDB cluster, the company achieved 100% database resilience during machine failures, configuration changes, and resource type changes, with little to no performance impact.
“We recently had a customer experiencing issues within the database, where it was constantly locking and leading to a system hang. On RDS this would have meant an entire reboot of our single instance. But using MySQL InnoDB Cluster, we simply restarted the service on one instance, seamlessly transitioned to a new primary cluster state, and nobody felt a thing. It was all done with the click of a button and no downtime,” said Yossi Bronshtein.
Using MySQL Enterprise Performance Schema, Rapyd achieved real-time visibility into database resources, locks, query performance and query waits, greatly improving systems management. “Now we have a comprehensive view of the database from the inside out. This makes it easier to debug, and also provides us with greater resource control when scaling to meet our business demands,” explained Yossi Bronshtein.
With MySQL InnoDB Cluster supporting each of Rapyd’s services in their given state, the company experiences no operational interruptions during version upgrades, machine type upgrades, storage type upgrades, or other configuration adjustments. “Upgrading the cluster is now a matter of seconds, whereas previous upgrades were significant events with database downtime exceeding 12 hours,” Yossi Bronshtein said.
Database performance was significantly enhanced by transitioning from a single-instance managed service on RDS to a self-managed clustered environment using MySQL Enterprise Edition on EC2. “Shortly after the migration we noticed a measurable performance impact from distributing the load over the cluster’s nodes. Yet, when we first saw group replication in action, we were still surprised at its speed and reliability compared to our previous asynchronous replication,” said Yossi Bronshtein.
The company also improved the performance of its fintech services by using non-infrastructural database features—for example, by adjusting configuration parameters and optimizing thread management—and by using MySQL Enterprise Monitor to find problematic queries and proactively alert the team about potential issues.
With greater control over its infrastructure configuration compared to a managed service, Rapyd has been able to customize storage, IOPS, and volume types, resulting in a 30% cost saving in cloud computing resources.
Rapyd used a range of MySQL Enterprise Edition tools to bolster database security across its fintech operations—for example, by enabling data encryption and masking, strengthening the database login method, and implementing granular access privileges.
The fintech company ensured a smooth deployment by leveraging expert support from the MySQL solution architect team, which provided close guidance throughout the planning and design phases and continues to provide post-implementation support and optimization. Rapyd swiftly resolves any database issues by also engaging dedicated specialists from Oracle Premier Support for MySQL. “We relish the quality of support, which is far superior to what we experienced with AWS trying to support RDS. Now, we have MySQL engineers supporting their own product, and we can talk directly with the product developers. We can really feel the difference,” commented Yossi Bronshtein.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
As a long-time user of MySQL, Rapyd selected MySQL Enterprise Edition because it offered the smoothest transition to achieving improvements in database performance, availability, visibility, security, scalability, and support.
“In today’s fintech world, speed, security, and resilience are key features to success, and we needed to build our database systems accordingly. MySQL Enterprise Edition ticked all of our boxes, even those we defined as ‘nice to have’,” said Yossi Bronshtein.
The company also created a proof of concept (POC) and conducted benchmarking tests across different models of MySQL deployments. The results demonstrated that InnoDB Cluster aligned perfectly with Rapyd’s core objectives, while MySQL Router was the most stable load-balancing solution with the best integration to the cluster.
“InnoDB Cluster with connection sharing was the only topology that takes us towards a zero-downtime policy, which in the world of payments is a critical business differentiator,” Yossi Bronshtein said.
Implementation
The implementation strategy included creating a Terraform template for automated provisioning of EC2 instances, developing Jenkins jobs for seamless integration of the MySQL cluster into Rapyd’s DevOps landscape, and using Ansible for standardized configuration management across the cluster.
This comprehensive approach not only streamlined the MySQL deployment but also supported Rapyd’s broader automation goals, empowering any DevOps or DBA team member to effortlessly create or deprovision infrastructure as needed for future projects.“