AnyDesk Scales Growth and Achieves Near Zero Downtime with Vital Postgres Support from EDB

About AnyDesk

Based out of Stuttgart, Germany, AnyDesk’s story began in 2012. As told on their website, “three technology pioneers shar[ed] one vision: to develop a high-speed and top-secure Remote Desktop Software that would eventually become one of the market-leading solutions.” This vision came to fruition in 2014, with the official foundation of AnyDesk Software GmbH. Today, AnyDesk’s solutions have been downloaded over 500 million times. Organizations of all sizes, across industries and around the world use AnyDesk’s software to help alleviate IT issues, connect over trainings and ensure communication among increasingly distributed workforces.

Challenge

From the beginning, AnyDesk knew they needed a database that could handle massive expansion, which is why they adopted Postgres in 2014. 

“It was an easy decision,” Fabian Girsch, head of Backend Operation for AnyDesk, said. “Postgres offered the best balance of speed and stability. Its reputation for scalability and performance was exceptional.” He continued “I personally think communities build better solutions than companies. Plus, from a cost perspective, there was never a way we would consider a commercial database like Oracle.”

On top of all this, Girsch noted Postgres’ replication, failover and backup capabilities would be essential for AnyDesk as they worked to establish trust among customers and in their industry.

The easy decision proved to be the right decision as they went—in their own words—”from start-up to scale-up” over the last 9 years.

Rapid growth brings new challenges

It didn’t take long for AnyDesk to become a market leader, quickly developing a reputation as easiest, simplest, straightforward and most responsive software of its kind. That growth led to a 9 terabyte database that required nightly backups and frequent upgrades, all while needing to meet customer expectations of constant availability. 

“Our database is the most crucial part of our technology stack,” Girsch emphasized. “It determines whether everything else rises or falls. I can replace nearly everything else in our technical infrastructure, but not our database.”

When their co-founder left, they found themselves in a difficult position. This was only exacerbated by the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when tools like AnyDesk’s became critical for uniting remote workforces and maintaining business continuity. Per Girsch, the pandemic saw an estimated 1800 to 2000% spike in AnyDesk downloads. The magnitude of their situation finally crystalized as they worked to install additional servers while at 94% database capacity.

With so many organizations relying on them to sustain IT and operations projects, AnyDesk could not afford to risk their reputation with an avoidable database crash. Suffice to say, they needed Postgres expertise, fast.

Solution

Faced with the difficult task of finding a new DBA who truly understood the nuances of Postgres, AnyDesk began their search, and quickly came upon EDB. “It really only took a couple of Google searches before it was clear EDB was the one for us,” Girsch laughed. “They could cover all we asked and more.”

As Girsch explained, AnyDesk was looking for both proactive and reactive support, both of which EDB was able to provide via EDB Remote DBA Services and the EDB Community 360 Plan. “Given the importance of our database,” Girsch said, “it’s so important that we have help whenever we need it.”

For AnyDesk, that support—both proactive and reactive—has manifested in a range of ways, especially for maintaining an Always On system. With EDB RDBA they don’t need to worry about the maintenance or monitoring of their infrastructure, and with EDB Community 360, they can trust that EDB will identify and alleviate any issues before they evolve into full-fledged problems.

“We actually had an outage the other day and EDB called to notify me before I even caught it,” Girsch mentioned.

Additionally, AnyDesk invested in EDB’s Backup and Recovery Manager (BARMAN) to help with their critical nightly backups. 

Results

With these three solutions combined, AnyDesk has been able to achieve what many enterprises are constantly striving for: near zero downtime.

“The way that EDB responds to our questions and challenges makes me feel like we really couldn’t do what we do right now without them,” Girsch stated. “The fact that EDB is so active in Postgres and its growth has really made us confident—that they have the tools we need or might need in the future. We can go forward how we want without database issues.”

This confidence has continued to propel AnyDesk forward, and transferred over to their own customers. As one of the standout solutions that made the transition to the world of remote work easier for businesses, AnyDesk’s ability to consistently support and empower those who rely on them—no matter their growth rate—is essential. With a database they can trust in and expertise they can rely on, Girsch’s optimism for the future of AnyDesk was contagious.
 

Future

When considering what’s next for AnyDesk, Girsch noted that—after their rapid vertical scaling—the next frontier appears to be equal horizontal growth. “We have a huge network of users around the world, and we’re continuing to grow to make sure we have the network to support them as best as possible.” While he suspects there will be challenges in the future, Girsch is certain that EDB will be there to help no matter what they attempt or encounter.

“I think one of the things that differentiated EDB for us was that they do so many things, and we’ll be able to use more of their tools if we want in the future,” Girsch explained. “If we want to do multi-master replication, we know EDB can help with that. If we want to have databases in the cloud, there’s EDB BigAnimal.”

Before signing off, Girsch made sure to add one more thing. Smiling, he recalled: “When we initially were researching EDB, I found a quote from a customer that I liked. He said something like, ‘I used to have trouble sleeping because I was so worried about my database.’ Now, I still don’t sleep much—but I’m never worried about my database.”

If you want to learn more about the full power of Postgres support from EDB, check out our white paper on what a difference enterprise-grade support can make!

Do you have an EDB Postgres success story you want to share? Get in touch with us via our website or at success-stories@enterprisedb.com