Choosing a MySQL Alternative to Build HA Product Inventory
AllSaints is a 27 year old global fashion retail business headquartered in the UK. We have brick and mortar locations all over the world and historically the business has depended massively on brick and mortar sales. And so it came as a surprise and relief to me that our customers were so willing to shift their behaviors during the pandemic and shop online, which helped us maintain healthy revenue numbers. As AllSaints has grown and expanded across the globe we’ve seen that our legacy systems based on MySQL are not able to scale with the growing customer base. I joined AllSaints six years ago and began modernizing and simplifying our infrastructure to be better suited for success in the future. We’ve moved a lot of our services to GCP. And we’ve looked for opportunities to bring tools in house and reduce dependencies on third parties.
This post discusses our wholesale business which we built on CockroachDB. I’ll cover the pain points we wanted to address with the database, why we chose CockroachDB over Spanner, what our wholesale workload architecture looks like, and our plans for the future with CockroachDB.
