THEIR CHALLENGE
Transforming from paper to digital
Finding a local business or tradesperson once involved hours ploughing the Yellow Pages and making a series of hopeful telephone enquiries. And then, with the dawn of the internet and the revolutionary power of the search engine, it seemed as if the directory format would become a thing of the past.
It didn’t. The directory lives on, albeit firmly adapted for the digital age. France’s version of the Yellow Pages, PagesJaunes, is one of the country’s most visited websites. The directory holds the details of nearly 5 million professional brands alongside access maps, historical commercial data, and user reviews, and is used by one in two French internet users.
Successfully adapting to digital operations, however, has required significant transformation. PagesJaunes had to transition from a completely physical, printed directory to a digital version while remaining relevant and current. However, its initial systems and data environment would only take it so far.
“At the beginning, the digital solution was monolithic,” said Bertrand Riandière, Technical Lead Architect at Solocal, the digital marketing business that owns PagesJaunes. “Naturally, over time, that became difficult to maintain.”
A strategic shift in 2013 saw Solocal move to a microservices architecture, which led to questions about the MySQL databases on which it had previously depended.
“It’s crucial to respond very quickly to user requests,” Riandière explained. “Requests need to be answered in just a few milliseconds and must be relevant, particularly with the search engine. Solocal conducted studies to find and test databases available at the time. After considering several options, it turned out that MongoDB was the most advanced in meeting our specific needs, such as monitoring.”
OUR SOLUTION
A new dawn in the cloud
Solocal’s first on-premise MongoDB deployment was initially highly successful, delivering key improvements in availability, performance, and ease of maintenance. However, as the cloud era arrived and the directory’s online users continued to grow, things began to change.
Solocal was, by this point, running one of the world’s largest on-premises MongoDB deployments, and it became increasingly apparent that managing the infrastructure on premise was becoming costly and prevented the site from evolving at the speed Solocal needed.
In 2017, Solocal started to migrate its technical stack to the cloud. For PagesJaunes and Solocal, the transition to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was an opportunity to evaluate other database technologies. After extensive diligent research, however, it concluded that MongoDB remained the best option.
Database management and provisioning remained in-house for a couple of years. However, the need to reduce infrastructure costs further, and take full advantage of the automation, performance, and security benefits of the cloud, meant moving to a fully managed database service was inevitable. In 2019, Solocal committed to migrating its databases to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model using MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB’s fully managed global database service, on Google Cloud.
“The goal with the MongoDB Atlas deployment was to remove some modules that we had to maintain internally, reduce costs, and improve efficiency to speed things up,” said Riandière. “Now, indexing happens automatically, eliminating the need for an intermediate step to perform searches. Also, for asynchronous processing, we manage each step of an asynchronous task.”
Previously, Solocal ran a virtual machine running Elasticsearch, a MongoDB-mirror to index all MongoDB updates into Elasticsearch, and some custom solutions for specific edge cases the business had developed separately.
“Now, we no longer need additional clusters—with MongoDB Atlas, everything is in the same place,” said Riandière. “We also spend much less time on maintenance as it’s part of a managed service that we already pay for.”
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