{"id":10528,"date":"2025-02-20T05:34:01","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T13:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pingcap.com\/?post_type=case-study&p=10528"},"modified":"2025-04-24T02:45:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T09:45:38","slug":"bolt-modernizing-mysql-tidb-scale-thousands-microservices-aws","status":"publish","type":"case-study","link":"https:\/\/www.pingcap.com\/ko\/case-study\/bolt-modernizing-mysql-tidb-scale-thousands-microservices-aws\/","title":{"rendered":"Bolt Modernizes MySQL with TiDB to Scale 1000s of Microservices on AWS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Started in 2013, Bolt is an on-demand mobility company, supporting 100 million users across 500 cities. Bolt is at the center of private mobility in the EMEA region. The company offers services across ride sharing, local delivery, and vehicle rental. Recently valued at $8.4 billion, Bolt has experienced 400% growth since the pandemic, making it the fastest growing company in Europe.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>The Challenge: Rethinking Application Development and Deployment for Microservices   <\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For starters, adding a column in their MySQL database could take up to a week on a loaded 1 terabyte (TB) table. To scale with the business, they had to rethink development, deployment, and how to scale their applications. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

AWS and Kubernetes were instrumental in their scaling challenges. However, you can\u2019t scale a database technology (MySQL) when it is not architected to do so\u2014not at Bolt\u2019s scale. Operating and maintaining their MySQL databases with fast-changing new microservices became \u201ca waking nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additionally, to support its millions of customers, the company has incredibly high expectations for system uptime and disaster recovery. But again, their MySQL database was too fragile to survive disasters. That means they would occasionally lose data, even though they deployed a multi-master cluster like Galera to enhance the system\u2019s availability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>The Problem: Scaling, Operating, and Maintaining Legacy MySQL <\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bolt had been a heavy MySQL shop for some time. The company used it as its main database. However, as the business expanded, MySQL was unable to keep up with the increasing workload. In short, the database had become difficult to scale, operate, and maintain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Bolt\u2019s engineering team operates thousands of microservices, 400+ schema, several hundred TBs of data, all on AWS. Business growth has pushed the engineering team to the limit, while the operational burden continued to accumulate around managing scalability and availability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>The Solution: Modernizing MySQL with Horizontal Scaling and Strong Consistency<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bolt needed a database solution that could scale dynamically on both reads and writes while providing strong consistency. To accommodate their agile development teams, they also needed a solution that was open source and integrated with their data pipeline built on Apache Kafka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To ease their operational burden, they wanted a relational database architected for AWS. With a global customer base, their database has to have zero downtime during maintenance and upgrade windows. Finally, their required solution also had to provide exceptional cost efficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bolt spent quite a bit of time exploring new solutions. Vitess was at one point a strong contender. However, it turned out that this database clustering system required too many changes to Bolt\u2019s applications\u2014all while having similar operational issues to MySQL. Additionally, Vitess had limited MySQL compatibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Did Bolt Choose TiDB?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

After much testing, Bolt decided on modernizing MySQL with \ud2f0DB<\/a>, an advanced open-source distributed SQL database for the most demanding modern applications. They chose TiDB for the following reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n