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

1. 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.

2. 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).

3. 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

4. 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.

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