Real-time analytics dashboard on their forefront of extranet
Optimizing global portal databases helping retailers and cities to monitor the recycling of 50 billion used bottles and cans a year in the world
T-CETRA
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
For more than 17 years, T-Cetra, based in Columbus, Ohio, has been a pioneer in leveraging proprietary, cutting-edge software to unlock access to underbanked markets through a robust network of 10,000 retailers.
Project Challenge
T-cetra needed an analytics dashboard for their vendors such as Amazon, verizon, tracfone that would be resilient, scalable and performing fast with near-real time data from their operational stores with the least impact on the operational activities. T-cetra generates about 20 million orders with more than a hundred thousand sales dealers for more than 20 thousand products per year.
Solution
AWS data migration services to Redshift was discarded during a POC with AWS engineering as AWS did not provide least-security solution due to the inefficiency to read encrypted log backups and due to their inability to offer a solution using something different than transaction replication on the operating stores using MSSQL 4-node Always-on cluster. We then routed for a Debezium solution that consumed change data capture data, replicated to isolated read-replica and using platform MSK for scalability. On Redshift, the flattening of JSON resolved any issue for schema augmentation and DBT was used to finish the job on the Redshift modelisation.
On the database source, we also implemented a module that handled the DDL changes to the tables to replicate as the events were automatically handling such changes, including computed columns, altering columns, adding columns or dropping columns, with a minimal impact (or near no downtime for any changes).
All was using best-practice AWS solutions regarding CICD, Terraform, IAM-first, Secret management, Encryption for database and other platform connections.