Mendix cuts emissions 58%, costs 10% using Graviton on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Mendix has three different cloud offerings deployed across 18 AWS Regions. Customers of these solutions run their applications in the Mendix environment, and each application has a dedicated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. These RDS for PostgreSQL instances were previously running on Intel x86-based instances.

Mendix wanted to optimize costs and enhance the sustainability of its environment, so it looked to migrate its customers’ Amazon RDS Intel x86-based instances to Graviton-based instances. “We knew we would get better value by moving to Graviton,” says Sarel Joubert, tech lead of the Cloud Center of Excellence at Mendix. “Because AWS Graviton-based instances are fully compatible with our PostgreSQL databases on Amazon RDS, we were able to develop a straightforward and reliable plan to migrate with confidence.”

Mendix set out to migrate the bulk of its Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances to Graviton-based instances. It started by carefully scheduling the migrations. The company was using Amazon RDS Reserved Instances (RI), which give the option of reserving a DB instance for a 1 or 3 year term, so it needed to schedule migrations within 3 to 5 days of its existing RI expiration dates. “Any customer we moved too soon or too late would cost us money,” says Tjalling Soldaat, engineering manager at Mendix. To accommodate customers with multiple accounts and databases, Mendix placed all databases in the same schedule batch.

To handle the complexity, Mendix built out automation in the form of a comprehensive maintenance service (see Figure 1). This maintenance service systematically migrated customer Amazon RDS deployments to Graviton-based instances, optimizing planning and minimizing downtime. The service used a fan-out architecture with message queues and AWS Lambda, a service for running code without thinking about servers or clusters.

Stability was key during the migration. “The most important requirement for our customers was that we complete the migration with minimal downtime inside of the 3-hour application maintenance window,” says Soldaat. “We successfully accomplished that.” The median time to migrate a customer application to a Graviton-based RDS for PostgreSQL instance was 20 minutes from application stop to application start.

Mendix worked with AWS to transform its RI instances into On-Demand instances, which empowered the company to carry out the final migrations at a faster pace with greater scheduling flexibility. During this final phase, Mendix migrated 878 RDS for PostgreSQL instances across 9 AWS Regions in under 9 hours.

For better reliability, Mendix deploys its solution across multiple Availability Zones using Amazon RDS multi-AZ, a feature of Amazon RDS that provides enhanced availability and durability. Mendix also uses AWS Backup—a fully managed service that centralizes and automates data protection—for disaster recovery. Since the migration, the solution has provided customers with high performance and reliability. “We chose to use Graviton-based instances for improved price-performance,” says Soldaat. “Our customers experience the same high performance they expect, while we achieve significant cost savings through the improved efficiency of Graviton with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.”

Mendix migrated over 12,000 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances to Graviton-based instances in 6 months.

As a result of moving to Graviton-based instances, the company has seen 10 percent annual cost savings. It also reduced compute emissions across all AWS Regions by more than 58 percent. “Cost optimization and sustainability are key reasons why we migrated to Graviton-based instances, and we have seen the benefits on both fronts,” says Soldaat.

Mendix now uses Graviton-based instances for all newly provisioned RDS for PostgreSQL instances, with over 18,500 instances in total. The team’s next project is to upgrade its instances to the latest PostgreSQL versions at least annually.

“Working alongside AWS has been great,” says Soldaat. “We feel supported by the expansive product offering and the experienced, skilled engineers who always provide us with clear, effective lines of communication.”