To improve efficiency and reduce management tasks, CallRail’s internal teams were in the process of migrating these databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Although CallRail had successfully conducted lift-and-shift migrations of its smaller databases, its main database posed a unique challenge. “When we got to our main production database, our previous approach was no longer viable due to the size of the database, which was around 5 TB,” says Drew Nall, staff site reliability engineer at CallRail. “Doing a lift-and-shift migration across the network would have taken days of downtime that we could not afford. There would have also been data inconsistencies in our product.”

Over the next 2 years, CallRail explored a variety of strategies and engaged outside consultants to complete the migration—none of which were successful. Additionally, the database’s version of PostgreSQL was no longer supported by Amazon RDS. This meant that CallRail needed to perform a version upgrade at the same time. After a series of trial and error, senior leaders at CallRail attended a consultation with the Ippon team. It was during this meeting that the path to a solution began to form.“We relayed to Ippon what we had gone through during our migration journey. It became clear that our issues were familiar to its team,” says Sean McCrohan, vice president of technology at CallRail. “We quickly recognized that this was a group that knew what was going on and how to fix it. We had a high level of confidence in moving forward with the partnership.”

Over the course of 9 months, Ippon helped CallRail successfully migrate its mission-critical database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, where developers can set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments. “This migration was a lot of work, as the Ippon team is very aware of all the very late nights that they spent with us,” says McCrohan. “But at every stage of the process, Ippon was bringing something to the table, unlike the previous firms we’d engaged. The team brought knowledge that we did not possess, which helped us move forward.” For example, Ippon suggested that CallRail reconfigure the extract, transform, and load tool that it was using to perform the migration. As an AWS Partner, Ippon obtained additional resources and specialized support for CallRail. “When we worked with Ippon, we felt like we were all on the same team,” says McCrohan. “Whenever we encountered issues, there was no hesitation for all of us to get on a call and participate in a brainstorming session. This high degree of confidence and low degree of ego helped everything flow smoothly and encouraged everyone to collaborate.”

The migration to Amazon RDS has brought about a significant transformation in CallRail’s database management and efficiency. Maintenance demands have decreased; as a result, the team can focus on more strategic tasks, such as performance optimization, rather than just keeping systems operational. The company can perform upgrades faster and enjoys greater scalability, which helps it adapt to changing needs and evolving technologies. This shift has simplified the management of backups, recoveries, and security processes, facilitating compliance with industry standards such as SOC 2. “This migration was the most challenging professional project I’ve worked on during my 20-year career. There were moments when I wasn’t sure if we were going to be successful,” says Nall. “But this partnership with Ippon was one of the first successful contractor engagements that we have had at CallRail. It’s really opened the door for us to seek support in the future.”

The final migration of CallRail’s mission-critical database was completed in 7 days—and created a ripple effect of enthusiasm. “Everyone in the company, even outside of engineering, was aware of the migration’s difficulty because they kept hearing us talk about it,” says McCrohan. “Everybody cheered when it was done. This migration proved that working with the right partner can be a successful way to engage with projects like this.”

Thanks to its engagement with Ippon, CallRail has established a template—that involves extending its capabilities through strategic partnerships—for how it approaches and overcomes technical challenges. “Becoming comfortable with leaning on outside partners is an important part of a company’s growth journey,” says McCrohan. “When CallRail encounters technical challenges that require us to augment our in-house skills or where we have exhausted the creativity of our people, we can work alongside AWS and reach out to our partners at Ippon for additional support.”

Founded in 2011, CallRail provides small and medium-sized businesses with insights into which marketing strategies are generating their customer phone calls. Its software relied on several legacy PostgreSQL databases hosted on self-managed instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For companies that conduct business over the phone, every call holds important data waiting to be unlocked.

“We relayed to Ippon what we had gone through during our migration journey. It became clear that our issues were familiar to its team,” says Sean McCrohan, vice president of technology at CallRail. “We quickly recognized that this was a group that knew what was going on and how to fix it. We had a high level of confidence in moving forward with the partnership.”

This migration was a lot of work, as the Ippon team is very aware of all the very late nights that they spent with us,” says McCrohan. “But at every stage of the process, Ippon was bringing something to the table, unlike the previous firms we’d engaged. The team brought knowledge that we did not possess, which helped us move forward.”