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mParticle Discusses Their Journey from Cassandra to ScyllaDB at ScyllaDB Summit 2017

Choosing a new NoSQL database solution for your organization is not an easy task, requiring large amounts of human resources and testing. Nayden Kolev of mParticle has done this many times in the past and most recently migrated to ScyllaDB at mParticle to process over 50 billion monthly messages with full availability and performance. I took a few minutes to sit down with Nayden to talk about his journey to ScyllaDB and get a sneak peek of his upcoming talk at ScyllaDB Summit 2017. Let’s begin the interview and learn more about what Nayden will be presenting.

Please tell us about yourself and what you do at mParticle?

I am the Systems Architect and Production Operations lead at mParticle. I have been with the company since 2013, helping to shape the infrastructure that supports our platform. We have overcome many scalability challenges to dynamically and efficiently scale to handle our customer demands. Prior to mParticle, I was a Solutions Architect at interCLICK/Yahoo, and AutoNation.

How did you become a Solutions Architect and why do you love it?

Somewhat early in my career, I realized I like solving infrastructure problems, automating processes and minimizing repetitive manual work. I enjoyed helping reduce issues and improve the “quality of work” of others. That naturally drove me into the role of Solutions Architect (and similar) positions at a few organizations in my career lately.

What will you be talking about at ScyllaDB Summit 2017?

I will be talking about mParticle’s experience choosing, deploying, migrating to, and using ScyllaDB on AWS. We have some unique requirements for the application, however, we believe our experience can be beneficial to others who are considering moving to ScyllaDB.

What type of audience will be interested in your talk?

DevOps and Engineers are likely to benefit the most from the content of the talk, but there are valuable lessons for anyone in an organization considering a migration to another database.

Can you please tell me more about your talk?

The talk will go through our pre-ScyllaDB environment and challenges, our deployment and migration process, and what we have done post-implementation to make the most of our ScyllaDB deployment. I will also share some of challenges and pitfalls to avoid when migrating between AWS instance types. Lastly, I will touch on our support experience with ScyllaDB Support Engineers and the benefit we see in them.

Without good support, would your deployment have been successful? Why?

Without good support, our deployment could technically have been successful, however it would have taken significantly more effort on our part, possibly leading to issues and roadblocks that would have lead us to decide against adopting ScyllaDB. Having solid support is vital in speed and success of adopting a new product into any environment, and we got this from ScyllaDB engineers from day 1.

How can the people get in touch with you?

The best way to get in touch with me is through email or LinkedIn.

Thank you very much, Nayden. We can not wait to see your talk in person and learn more. We will have over 40 talks at ScyllaDB Summit 2017.

ScyllaDB Summit is taking place in San Francisco, CA on October 24-25. Check out the full agenda on our website to learn about the rest of the talks—including technical talks from the ScyllaDB team, the ScyllaDB roadmap and a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to get the most out of your ScyllaDB cluster.