Case Studies | GovTech

Removing the single point of failure

Aurora MySQL Migration and Read Scaling

About

A GovTech business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The challenge had three focus areas, each of which had to be resolved to give the client a dependable, scalable database platform.

Resilience and the single point of failure

A single writer instance with no replicas meant any failure of that instance took the whole platform down. The design needed replicas across Availability Zones with a defined promotion tier so that failover became automatic rather than an outage.

Read scaling and connection pressure

With a 95% read workload, a connection-per-request PHP application and no pooling, the primary instance suffered contention and long-tail latency. The solution had to offload reads to replicas, quarantine reporting traffic, and absorb the connection churn with RDS Proxy.

Engine modernisation without a risky big-bang

Moving from Aurora MySQL v2 (5.7) to v3 (8.0) had to remove the Extended Support fees and unlock a modern engine, but an earlier migration attempt had failed. The upgrade needed a compatibility assessment across all schemas and a Blue/Green approach with a tested rollback path.

Solution

Cloud Combinator structured the engagement across four phases, each producing concrete, handover-ready deliverables.

100k

Tables across ~4,000 tenant schemas assessed for compatibility

95%

Read workload the new replica and proxy tier is built to absorb

$2,500/mo

AWS Extended Support fees the v3 upgrade removes

By the numbers:

  • 100k - Tables across ~4,000 tenant schemas assessed for compatibility
  • 95% - Read workload the new replica and proxy tier is built to absorb
  • $2,500/mo - AWS Extended Support fees the v3 upgrade removes
Changes

Cloud Combinator delivered a complete, phased path to a resilient and modern database platform: the read-scaling and connection design, the compatibility assessment, the Blue/ Green migration and rollback runbooks, post-cutover hardening, and CloudFormation templates codifying the full target state, all walked through with the client's team in guided handover sessions. Acceptance is against the migration from Aurora MySQL v2 to v3 and the completion of those handovers.

  • Resilience by design — Three Aurora replicas across Availability Zones with a promotion-tier-0 standby turn a single point of failure into automatic failover.
  • Reads that scale — Custom reader endpoints and three RDS Proxy instances offload the 95% read workload, quarantine reporting traffic and tame the connection-per-request pattern that caused long-tail latency.
  • A modern engine — A Blue/Green upgrade path from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 removes the Extended Support fees and modernises the platform, with compatibility checked across every schema and a tested rollback.
  • Repeatable and documented — CloudFormation templates, operational runbooks and a documented AWS DMS contingency path leave the whole target state codified and owned by the client.
  • Handover — Guided calls and Loom recordings walked the client's team through every deliverable.

With a resilient, read-scaled and modern database foundation mapped out and codified, the client is positioned to grow its platform confidently, with clear next steps toward a session store on Amazon DynamoDB and a containerised application tier when it is ready to take them.

AWS Stack

Amazon Aurora MySQL

For the resilient, read-scaled relational database, upgraded from v2 (5.7) to v3 (8.0).

Amazon RDS Proxy

For connection pooling and multiplexing in front of the writer and reader endpoints.

AWS CloudFormation

For codifying the full target-state infrastructure for repeatable deployment.

Amazon CloudWatch

And Database Insights for observability of the expanded environment.

AWS DMS

For the documented contingency migration path to RDS MySQL 8.4 LTS.

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