Vainu cuts costs and boosts productivity with MongoDB Atlas on AWS

Vainu helps businesses harness the power of data for sales and marketing campaigns by collecting and refining its customers’ company and contract data, and making it accessible in their CRM platforms. Data is well-organized, easy to search, and can be sent to other applications using APIs.

In 2013, three friends founded this Nordic company, and spent their small budget on an SQL database and a single on-premises server. In three years, the company generated more than $2 million in revenue and migrated its database to MongoDB.

“Using a SQL database became a nightmare because of how often the schemas would keep changing,” said Kimmo Parviainen-Jalanko, Head of Engineering Operations at Vainu.

As the company grew, its team was spending too much time managing servers. Vainu’s self-managed cluster was difficult to scale, and because the company was a startup, the team was doing system admin jobs alongside their main duties. “Everything was reactive, we were always firefighting,” said Parviainen-Jalanko.

Downtime was also becoming an issue, so Vainu realized that it needed to migrate to a more scalable and reliable platform.

KIMMO PARVIAINEN-JALANKO, Head of Engineering Operations, Vainu

Vainu decided to adopt MongoDB Atlas on AWS, using resources provided by the partners to simplify the migration. Vainu gradually moved elements of its production environment from self-managed MongoDB to fully managed MongoDB Atlas, and scaled down the cluster.

It also modernized its environment using AWS tools to containerize applications and optimize domain management and storage.

“Lots of our larger customers use the API in an asynchronous way,” says Parviainen-Jalanko. “To reduce search times, we provide them with a pre-signed URL to the location their data is stored. We have 90 million domains in our global database, so without that it might take too long.”

Vainu developers no longer spend their time managing infrastructure. Instead, they’re focused on improving applications and innovating in test environments. Backups are automated and the platform has rollback capabilities.

“All of our backups are automatically handled by Atlas so we can easily roll back without having to worry. It’s less stressful for everybody,” said Parviainen-Jalanko. “Scaling, backups, data archival, cluster certificates—it is now no longer a problem for us. We’re very happy to be working at this level.”

KIMMO PARVIAINEN-JALANKO, Head of Engineering Operations, Vainu

“Our infrastructure costs for our cluster fell from €17,000 per month to €3,000 per month because we moved from an underutilized, outdated, unmanageable, and unscalable cluster to MongoDB Atlas on AWS,” said Parviainen-Jalanko.

Vainu also reduced the costs of migrating workloads to the cloud with support from MongoDB and AWS, and the company benefits from greater cost controls. For example, when developers spin up a test environment, Vainu only pays for the resources it uses.

“One of the biggest benefits of using MongoDB Atlas on AWS is the reliability and the cost visibility,” explained Parviainen-Jalanko. “With Atlas, we can scale the clusters, or we can easily spin up new clusters.”

With enhanced security and multiple clusters in MongoDB Atlas, Vainu can also track compliance with GDPR regulations. “We can more easily scope our compliance efforts based on which type of data a cluster contains, such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information) versus GDPR,” added Parviainen-Jalanko.

Vainu is now well placed to grow and continue helping B2Bs to make smarter decisions with their company data.