Why high availability is key for access management

Challenges & Requirements

The company started in 2001 providing electronic lock hardware that was installed on-prem. While the physical products are still a large part of their business, they needed to develop a cloud-based platform that could collect data from these devices in real-time — and they needed to guarantee that customers could still unlock doors even if there was any sort of outage.

The team at SALTO knew that a “lift-and-shift” migration to the cloud was not going to be the best approach for their legacy application built on SQL Server. Here’s some of the challenges they faced:

• They had to take the app down to do online schema changes

• They had to take the app down to deal with database upgrades

• An active-passive system put their applications at risk and created complexities (primary, failover, read replicas) for the developers

They decided to build a new product from scratch in order to deliver a better, faster experience for their customers. Building a greenfield project with no dependencies on prior work made sense. However, it was also important for their developer team to be able to get up and running quickly with an easy-to-use solution.

After years of operating a legacy system, the team at SALTO had some requirements for their new database: active-active experience, easy to operate, easy to upgrade/make changes.

They considered PostgreSQL since it's a powerful relational database, but it also involves a lot of manual work. They wanted to “extract the developer from the infrastructure” meaning that they didn’t want them doing any database management and focus on solving the business problem at hand. With their previous infrastructure, their developers didn’t think that making small changes meant taking down the system; it seemed irrelevant to them. But it was actually having a big impact on the business.

Gorka Lerchundi, the Engineering Manager & Tech Lead at SALTO, suggested that they evaluate CockroachDB. He is a self-proclaimed “database freak” who follows the industry on Twitter and heard that the ex-Googlers who created GIMP built a database called CockroachDB.

Applications

SALTO uses CockroachDB as the persistent datastore backing their user access management system to serve customers across the world. We know how this works under the covers, but what does it look like from the end-user perspective?

When you purchase a SALTO product, you get the physical locks, wallreader, keycard, key fob, wristband, etc., plus the software that supports all these devices. Once you install the physical device, you then designate the users that should have access. To open a SALTO lock, for example, the user communicates directly with the device through a card swipe, PIN code, etc. Before the door unlocks, SALTO’s platform verifies the user's access rights and returns the signal to unlock (or not, as the case may be). All of this happens in real time, and the metadata generated from every user interaction is stored within the database. So there’s an accessible log of data such as who accessed the room, what room they accessed, what time they accessed, and much more.

Since SALTO was very happy with CockroachDB’s performance for their IAM solution, they decided to use it for a new product that would have an integration with Apple. Apple has requirements for partners around performance, feature sets, survivability. When Apple releases a hardware refresh, an iOS update, or a new device, they see massive spikes in traffic. So not only was it important that SALTO could prove the reliability and performance of their product, but they had to ensure that it would scale for spiky workloads.

Since CockroachDB is built to scale automatically and horizontally, SALTO reports that it “behaved very well and was a really important component of this new product.” They could easily add more capacity whenever needed, so there was no impact to performance. And, once again, their developers didn’t need to worry about building scalability into the application layer to handle traffic spikes, because the database simply took care of it instead.

Applications

For SALTO, CockroachDB’s technology solves a lot of their problems and pairs well with their own steady growth. Gorka says that their partnership with Cockroach Labs has been very valuable since it's nice to work with “pleasant, forward-thinking, open-minded people that see value in your partnership”.

In the near future, SALTO plans to move some of their workloads to CockroachDB Serverless which is a fully-managed service with great benefits (automated scale! No ops!). Gorka thinks this serverless offering will be a hit with developers and make their lives even easier.

Finally, if you are interested in IAM and working at a leading access management company, SALTO is always hiring. Plus you get to work with CockroachDB. Check out their job listings here.