Zenly: The Journey for a Database Replacement

Zenly, a mobile application for real-time location sharing, faced challenges with their initial database, Elasticsearch, due to poor performance with update operations and difficulty in data monitoring. Although they considered Apache Cassandra as a replacement, concerns about Garbage Collection interruptions and the high costs associated with large cluster maintenance led them to choose ScyllaDB instead. ScyllaDB offered Zenly enhanced performance and lower latencies with fewer nodes, reducing operational costs, and provided a straightforward monitoring solution through a stack using Grafana and Prometheus. This switch allowed Zenly to optimize hardware usage and address their monitoring issues effectively.