American multinational financial services company Wells Fargo has tapped open source distributed SQL database company Yugabyte for achieving database modernisation to enable valuable services that rely on consistent, globally accessible data.
Wells Fargo’s principal engineer for database strategy and innovation, Nathaniel Drehmel told the Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) 2022 that Yugabyte covered the financial solutions the firm needed for a resilient, secure, scalable, and high-performance data platform to deliver an ‘exceptional’ customer experience.
“Distributed SQL aligned to our needs and overall innovation strategy,” he said.
Distributed SQL is an option for database architects that could give benefits of both SQL and NoSQL databases and cloud-native features like open source and multi-cloud. Such advancements support easy shifting from legacy systems, he added.
Wells Fargo has faced a significant resiliency issue in one of their data centres, leading to a loss in some of technology portfolios.
"We run a number of different database products, but certainly the prevalence is still towards a legacy, relational database estate,” he added.
The firm was doing a lot of failovers through database administrator or engineer manually. It also had a portfolio of non-relational database compute platforms active in multiple locations. An active-active platform already deployed to multiple data centres using a singular topology has proved very resilient.
We needed a centrally managed topology that was simple to deploy and could give a relational platform with ACID(atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability)-compliant transaction support, Drehmel said.
Scalable systems
Wells Fargo has focussed on building a horizontally scalable system. They needed a platform for teams to use for a significant portion of their estate like the primary relational database platform to work for 2000 workloads.
He explained that the litmus test was whether, for the majority of use cases, the firm could lift workloads from their legacy platform to this new platform in a relatively low friction without having to completely rewrite the application and the data layer.
With Yugabyte, Wells Forgo said it could have an interface familiar for their developers and administrators to be ‘quickly’ productive.
Speaking on the database strategy execution at Wells Fargo, Drehmel said they are working to use the distributed SQL platform as a general-purpose, ubiquitous platform within Wells Fargo.
“Distributed SQL should just be how we do relational computing, and its success will be all about the database that rides on top of the underlying distributive SQL system… We want to build a data centric business ready for any future- evolving as we go into the next three, six, twelve years, maturing it,” he added.
