Billions of Files, One Solution: Find Out How Bookmate Saves Huge Costs

The challenge: billions of small files

Bookmate is an eBook app that can be accessed from different devices: hey offer eBook and audiobook subscriptions.
Vasily Kolesnikov, CTO of Bookmate, says that the biggest challenge for their infrastructure has been the sheer volume of files.
'Each chapter of a book is a small, separate text file. And there are around 2 million books in our database.
On top of that, customers can upload their own eBooks to Bookmate. So you can imagine how many files we have – billions of them.'
Managing their infrastructure is no easy task. Bookmate therefore opted for an internally developed software-defined storage solution, but specific
hardware was also necessary.

Custom hardware for a specific issue

In 2011, Bookmate had two standard servers  with their former provider. The need for custom hardware arose and they started looking for a hoster in the
Netherlands or Germany: close to their customer base.
They were in search of a reliable partner as their provider was struggling with hardware and network issues.
And all this at a reasonable price, as Bookmate was still a start-up at the time.

They found it at Worldstream. Vasily: ‘Why we opted for Worldstream? They offered us the hardware we needed, without fixed configurations.
That was both unusual and exactly what we were looking for. We expressed what we needed, and Worldstream made it happen.
A huge advantage for the issue we were facing. We were very pleased to receive a reply within a few minutes.
We were also offered the option of a video call. This meant that we were able to communicate directly.'

Low costs due to proprietary software within the Worldstream infrastructure

From the start, Bookmate has used GluserFS, which – according to Vasily – is the best solution for terabytes, or even petabytes of small files.
‘Originally, we worked with bare metal nodes. Ten years ago, monolithic applications ran on these bare metal nodes.
Now everything lives in contrainers: In fact, we have built our own on-premises cloud based on these nodes.
This is our in-house virtualisation platform. So, within the Worldstream infrastructure, we use our own software defined storage and have developed our own custom cloud service.'

Why Bookmate is not switching to a public cloud provider? 'We did a cost calculation and the monthly payments would be about seven times higher,’ says Vasily. This has to do with the fact that the billions of files are billed based on network and computer usage.

‘Worldstream's support is the best and fastest we've seen’

Another important reason for Bookmate to switch to Worldstream was their need for technical support.
‘Worldstream's support is the fastest we've seen so far. In my entire career, I cannot think of another service provider that has offered better support.
For example, when a drive breaks down, Worldstream's support team responds within minutes and fixes it. Any time, day or night.
And if we need an upgrade, for example, it is done in a matter of minutes.
With other providers, we had to wait two days for an initial response, and then the issue had yet to be resolved.’

Smooth migrations

Vasily continues: 'When we migrated from your first data centre to the second data centre in Naaldwijk, Worldstream's sales team suggested a temporary custom configuration at no extra cost. As a result, the migration ran smoothly.
For our backups, we still had a few servers at another hosting provider.'

With the opening of another Worldstream data centre in 2021, Bookmate decided to move all their systems to Worldstream Data Centres.
As a result, their IT infrastructure is now in close proximity to their European customer base.
‘Both the production and backup systems are now hosted by Worldstream, spread across the data centres in Naaldwijk and Frankfurt.
It just goes to show how much confidence we have in them.'

About Bookmate

Bookmate is an e-book subscription service that makes reading accessible to anyone with a mobile phone anywhere in the world.
They inspire millions of people around the globe to read more, discover new books and make new friends with shared interests.