Despite all the challenges that 2020 brought, Reltio hit major innovation and growth milestones last year thanks to our employees, customers, and partners. As VP of Engineering at Reltio, I know first-hand how important that last group — partners — has been to our company and our customers over the years.
A great example is our long-standing alliance with Amazon Web Services. Reltio Connected Customer 360, our cloud-native multi-domain MDM offering, leverages AWS managed services to deliver high availability, efficient services, and business agility to our customers with great success. Today, enterprises all over the world can purchase, deploy and manage our SaaS platform in AWS Marketplace. When we launched in AWS Marketplace, Joanna Walker, Global MDM Architect at AstraZeneca, commented that the availability of Reltio Connected Customer 360 on the AWS Marketplace was “a game-changer for businesses like AstraZeneca that are embracing a cloud-first strategy or migrating to the cloud.”
Often these customer experiences involve use cases in which high volumes of API transactions – requests to the Reltio platform for data – need to happen in real-time. Currently, Reltio manages 36.6 billion API calls for its customers annually. To better manage the volume and speed of data flows these kinds of applications require, Reltio recently adopted Amazon DynamoDB. It delivers increased performance, agility, and scalability for our customers.
Amazon DynamoDB: Strengthening the Reltio Connected Data Platform through Technical Innovation
Reltio already leveraged modern technologies such as SaaS, a big data architecture, machine learning, and managed services. Turning to a managed database from Amazon to an agile, scalable, and cost-efficient platform for customers, made sense. While we wanted to make sure we provided the best service we could to customers, we also wanted to make running our infrastructure as simple, reliable, and efficient as possible. DynamoDB, a fully managed, multi-region database with built-in security, backup and restore, has helped us achieve this.
For one, it eliminates operational overhead. Our DevOps team no longer needs to spend time provisioning, patching, and managing servers. They have no software to install, maintain, or operate. The move to DynamoDB has allowed engineering to reclaim almost 80 percent of the resource time previously spent on database management and shift it to ongoing development and innovation.
That said, one of the main reasons we started looking for a new database was a speed-to-scale. NoSQL database technology has always been a critical building block of our cloud-native infrastructure. The NoSQL database we were using was not able to respond to the spiky workloads of many of our customers. Predicting and responding to spikes in operational workloads was difficult and responding in real-time was expensive if not impossible. AWS DynamoDB provides elastic throughput separated from scaling of storage, making fast scalability cost-effective for Reltio and its customers.
Amazon DynamoDB delivers single-digit millisecond latency at scale. It can manage auto-scaling within minutes to match the speed we need if customer workloads spike. That gives us the flexibility to run at a lower baseline capacity and scale up when it’s necessary to accommodate the workloads that customers need. DynamoDB’s flexible scalability applies to both storage and compute power. Our previous database didn’t allow us to decouple these things.
DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day, supporting peaks of more than 20 million requests. It gives us the ability to address any volume of master data as well as ingest interaction data, which means our customers don’t face limitations or performance bottlenecks. And workload runs are more predictable.
Amazon DynamoDB powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of the 66-hour Prime Day, these sources made 16.4 trillion calls to the DynamoDB API, peaking at 80.1 million requests per second.
Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS
DynamoDB has helped reduce the operational burdens of the engineering team while enabling a better and more stable platform experience for Reltio customers. The net result: Customers can focus on business and not have to worry about the platform. And largely, so can we. It’s a win-win for our employees, our customers, and our partner.
What Customers Can Do When Platform Performance Isn’t An Issue
Companies around the world are being driven by consumer demand for better, faster, more personalized, and relevant experiences across all channels. The accelerant behind better customer experience is data. When companies rely on a cloud-native, multi-domain master data management platform with an API-first architecture, they can integrate data from multiple sources to create hyper-personalized customer interactions across omnichannel touchpoints in real-time and at scale. Reltio provides all that plus privacy, consent, and communication preference compliance management. All of this would be more difficult and complex without the underlying foundation of AWS Managed Services and the dynamic scalability of Amazon DynamoDB.
An example of what Reltio’s technology with the help of Amazon can deliver for its customers is real-time access to customer data on mobile loyalty applications. The Subway Mobile App allows customers to order their favorite meals and access Express Pickup. They can customize orders, save their favorite sandwich, find a nearby restaurant, get personalized digital coupons, earn points on purchases, pay ahead of time or scan to pay. They can manage offers and rewards. It even supports curbside pick-up!
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[1] AWS Blog: Amazon Prime Day 2020 – Powered by AWS
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