Project Management SaaS Company Uses EDB Postgres Distributed to Achieve Consistent Performance Globally

ClickUp is a SaaS project management and collaboration software that makes the world more productive with its intuitive design. ClickUp’s customers range from individuals and small businesses to large corporations such as Apple, Nike, Uber, Google and AirBnB. The platform helps users manage tasks, documents, conversations, and timelines all in one place. With over 100,000 teams world-wide, ClickUp is the fastest growing productivity software due to its unique, customizable user experience and cutting-edge features.

Challenge

ClickUp has been using PostgreSQL as the backbone of their systems since its inception. The platform attracted users at a global scale, creating an incredible and unexpected growth. Due to scaling needs, ClickUp identified a geographically distributed cluster with distributed PostgreSQL databases as the best solution.

Initially, to overcome geographical issues that were created by their international customer base, ClickUp tried to replicate data to other regions but faced several problems with write-latency and consistency.

While engineers were spending several hours daily optimizing the system, the ClickUp team began looking for a Multi-Master solution to overcome the performance issues faced by their customers. ClickUp identified BDR v1 for their geographically distributed needs, as it was “the only real Multi-Master solution for Postgres databases,” says Alex Yurkowski, CTO of ClickUp.

As ClickUp continued to grow, the complexity of their application’s scalability and performance requirements increased. Exhausted with their internal efforts and resources, it became clear that they were hitting limits of performance and scalability in BDR v1. ClickUp’s tech team approached EDB for problem resolution. After a thorough analysis, the EDB team recommended ClickUp move to EDB Postgres Distributed v3 for solving performance and scalability issues they faced on the older version of the tool.

Solution

EDB's team of PostgreSQL experts helped ClickUp upgrade to EDB Postgres Distributed v3 within the planned downtime. Using industry best practices and ClickUp’s business requirements, the cluster was optimally configured using EDB Postgres Distributed. This allowed ClickUp to scale their system for exponential growth while delivering peak performance to their customers. “We can certainly attribute help in our growth to EDB Postgres Distributed since we now have consistent performance globally and are able to grow our business in multiple regions,” said Alex Yurkowski, CTO at ClickUp.

ClickUp’s current cluster holds 300 GBs of data which is distributed over 7 nodes. The present configuration, with multiple Master nodes, has allowed them to set up High Availability across some regions while remaining regions transition incrementally. This attributed to the platform’s 99.999% uptime for a consecutive 12 months.

Acknowledging the importance of having PostgreSQL experts available around the clock, ClickUp also subscribed to EDB'S 24/7 Support. In the words of Alex: “EDB's support has helped us to upgrade our PostgreSQL and BDR version with zero downtime and resolve any issues that have come up with using the extension, as well as analyze our PostgreSQL server configurations to ensure we are getting the best performance out of our database cluster.”

Services provided

• EDB Postgres Distributed migration

• Consultancy

• 24/7 Production Support

To learn more about EDB Postgres Distributed, you can download our white paper, Postgres-BDR: The Next Generation of PostgreSQL High Availability.