Cloud Blog: Reltio’s Data Plane Transformation with Spanner on Google Cloud

Source URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/spanner/reltio-migrates-from-cassandra-to-spanner/
Source: Cloud Blog
Title: Reltio’s Data Plane Transformation with Spanner on Google Cloud

Feedly Summary: In today’s data-driven landscape, data unification plays a pivotal role in ensuring data consistency and accuracy across an organization. Reltio, a leading provider of AI-powered data unification and management solutions, recently undertook a significant step in modernizing its data infrastructure by migrating from self-managed Cassandra to Spanner on Google Cloud. The outcome of this endeavor showcases amplified performance capabilities and seamless scalability.Reltio provides AI-powered data unification and management solutions that deliver unified, trusted data where and when it’s needed so that enterprises can be responsive to changing business needs. Powered by the Reltio Connected Data Platform, Reltio’s offerings — 360 Data Products, Multidomain Master Data Management (MDM), and Entity Resolution — unify disparate data sources in milliseconds, creating a single source of truth for decision making. Reltio delivers AI-ready, high-quality data in real time, with built-in scalability, security, and flexibility. Leading enterprises across industries around the globe rely on Reltio to accelerate growth, drive efficiency, and manage risk.
Given such demanding workloads, Reltio needed a database that can scale, has low latency, and provides the reliability that the Reltio Connected Data Platform needs. Migration should also be straightforward. Reltio chose Spanner which satisfied all of its requirements.
“Implementing our logic for Spanner was incredibly straightforward,” said Reltio’s Principal Architect, Ivan Kliavin. “The code we wrote to support Spanner is simpler and more intuitive than for any other database we’ve worked with."
Why Spanner Proved to be the Ideal Choice

Seamless Scalability and Performance: Spanner’s ability to scale effortlessly and seamlessly adapt to fluctuating workloads empowered Reltio to adapt to varying demands, ensuring optimal performance at all times.

Enhanced Reliability and Availability: Compared to self-managed Cassandra, Spanner offered built-in reliability enhancements that provide peace of mind with its high availability guarantees (99.99% for regional and 99.999% for multi-regional).

Unlocking Innovation: Spanner’s rich feature set, including integrated search capabilities and seamless integration with other Google Cloud services, paves the way for Reltio to explore new features and elevate their data unification offerings. ACID transactions provide unparalleled data consistency, while multi-regional instances enable greater availability for their services

Simplified Operations: Spanner’s fully managed nature eliminates the overhead of managing infrastructure, achieving streamlined operations and significant cost reductions.

Reltio’s Spanner Architecture and Migration Plan
Let’s take a closer look at the technical architecture and migration strategy that enabled Reltio’s smooth transition to Cloud Spanner.
Tenant Security and Isolation

Each tenant’s data can be  stored in a dedicated Spanner database, ensuring complete physical data plane isolation.

Access to each database is tightly controlled utilizing Spanner’s robust security framework. 

Compute plane utilizes a service account with permissions to ephemerally assume roles for seamless data access.

Autoscaling and Capacity Management

A hybrid autoscaling model leverages both automated scaling based on CPU and storage metrics, along with manual scaling triggered by client-side latency thresholds.

This approach ensures optimal performance and resource utilization while safeguarding against over-scaling due to badly throttled tenants.

Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery

Point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups are implemented using database export/import, stored in Google Cloud Storage with a custom lifecycle configuration for cost efficiency.

Regional disaster recovery backups are stored in secondary Spanner instances located in backup regions, enabling fast recovery in the event of a regional outage.

Tenant Provisioning and Monitoring

A Cloud Function automates tenant provisioning, service account creation, and instance assignment.

Another Cloud Function monitors tenant usage and instances, optimizing autoscaling configurations and cleaning up unused resources.

Throttling and Noisy Neighbor Prevention

Reltio’s internal traffic-shaping, based on credits, is adapted for Spanner to ensure fair resource allocation across tenants in shared instances.

The inbuilt Spanner autoscaler function analyzes per-database metrics to prevent over-provisioning and protect against workloads from one tenant impacting others.

This is a great example of resource management at the application and database layers working in harmony to deliver a consistent experience to the customer, and is a best practice for a well-architected application.
A Model for Success
Reltio’s success exemplifies the power of a joint design, well-executed database migration, and deep operational collaboration between application and data layers. Their experience highlights the possibilities for organizations seeking to modernize their data infrastructure, achieve greater agility, and unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation.

“Reltio” is a registered trademark, and “Reltio Connected Data Platform” is a trademark of Reltio, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. All Rights Reserved.

AI Summary and Description: Yes

Summary: The text illustrates Reltio’s successful migration to Google Cloud Spanner, enhancing its data unification capabilities through improved performance, scalability, reliability, and simplified operations. This is highly relevant to security and compliance professionals in the cloud computing and data management sectors.

Detailed Description:
The migration of Reltio to Google Cloud Spanner showcases a significant advancement in data infrastructure management, particularly for organizations that require reliable data unification while maintaining high performance and security. This transition serves as a case study for professionals looking to modernize infrastructure in alignment with contemporary demands.

Key Insights and Points:

– **Data Unification Significance**: Reltio’s role is pivotal in unifying data to ensure consistency and accuracy across enterprises, which is critical for timely and informed decision-making.

– **Migration Motivation**:
– Reltio required a scalable, low-latency database solution that also offers reliability. Spanner was chosen as it met all these criteria.

– **Performance and Scalability**:
– Spanner provides seamless scalability that allows Reltio to adjust to workload fluctuations effectively, ensuring optimal operational performance.

– **Reliability Enhancements**:
– The platform guarantees high availability (99.99% for regional and 99.999% for multi-regional), significantly enhancing reliability compared to the previously used self-managed Cassandra.

– **Operational Simplification**:
– The fully managed nature of Spanner reduces infrastructure management burdens, allowing Reltio to streamline operations and cut costs.

– **Security Measures**:
– Tenant data isolation is prioritized via dedicated databases and a robust security framework that controls access tightly.
– The operational model employs service accounts for secure and seamless data access across the cloud.

– **Backup and Recovery**:
– Point-in-time recovery and regional disaster recovery mechanisms ensure data integrity and availability in case of outages, crucial for compliance with data protection regulations.

– **Resource Management**:
– Reltio employs a hybrid autoscaling model to optimize resource utilization and prevent overscaling, addressing common challenges like noisy neighbor issues.

– **Innovative Features**:
– Features such as ACID transactions, integrated search capabilities, and multi-regional instances enable Reltio to elevate its service offerings, signaling the potential for innovative feature development in future releases.

– **Best Practices**:
– Reltio’s approach exemplifies best practices for database management and cloud migration, emphasizing collaborative efforts between application and data layers to enhance security and performance.

Overall, Reltio’s migration to Spanner highlights the importance of scalable, reliable cloud solutions in modernizing data infrastructures, making it a pivotal case for professionals focused on AI and cloud computing security.