Upgrading Kitely’s Database Infrastructure

We’ve been getting a lot of new interest from organizations recently, who want to use Kitely to replace some of their large in-person gatherings. So we decided to improve our ability to handle events with tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Kitely’s system was designed to scale, as exemplified by our ability to dynamically add servers when additional worlds are used. However, our system also has some centralized components that are harder to scale. One of these component is a MySQL database that we have been running on our own server in the Amazon cloud. The problem with this system is that the performance of the database is limited by the server that it’s running on.

In order to improve our scalability, we are going to migrate to an Amazon database system called Aurora Serverless. This database is capable of scaling up automatically when necessary, and scaling back down when the additional resources are no longer required. This behavior is ideal for supporting very large events.

This major upgrade to our capabilities requires that we take down the entire system for 6 hours on April 17 at 12:01am PDT (midnight).

Published by

Ilan Tochner

Ilan Tochner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kitely.