Icertis automates scaling, reduces costs by 70%, meets customer demand around the clock

Unpredictable workloads

As a leading provider of contract lifecycle management in the cloud, Icertis helps some of the world’s biggest organizations maximize contract value, stay compliant, and develop trusting customer relationships. Its customers use the cloud-based Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform to manage over 6.5 million contracts in more than 40 languages across 90-plus countries. With ICM, customers enjoy nonstop service availability, intelligent workflows, and built-in analytics that are accessible from a single, user-friendly dashboard.

With a large volume of users around the world, Icertis found it difficult to predict the volatility of daily spikes in customer workload demand and to scale resources accurately. Attempts at using custom in-house solutions to rescale provisioned compute databases required many manual interventions and were costly to maintain. “Scaling remained challenging, unpredictable, and time consuming,” says Purna Rao, Senior DevOps Architect at Icertis.

Icertis needed an automation solution that could almost instantly rescale the ICM application to the performance levels its customers needed, when they needed it. The company decided to move many of its provisioned compute databases to Microsoft Azure SQL Database serverless.

Unlocked scaling

With the SQL Database serverless compute tier, Icertis found a solution to support its ICM platform—one that automatically scales compute power based on workload demand and only bills for compute resources that are used each second. It also found that its past SQL Database experience made using serverless even easier than expected.

“Even a non-technical person can move their database into serverless,” says Sandeep Kulkarni, Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President for IT and Cloud Operations at Icertis. “It’s as simple as that. The transition is smooth and it’s easy.”

Icertis teams now know that they have up to a defined number of cores ready and waiting for ICM customers to use on demand. Scaling up is fast, too, and when workload demand falls, the serverless databases automatically release resources to lower costs. If the workload is idle for long enough, serverless automatically pauses the database and bills only for storage. This saves Icertis time, money, and resources—the company only pays for the compute it uses, and its people are free to focus on new automation initiatives.

“Serverless removes the burden of managing database performance based on our customers’ business hours, and we don’t have to worry about scale times affecting the performance experience for our customers,” says Kulkarni. “Serverless quickly and automatically provides the right amount of compute resources based on database usage, and I know that I’m only going to pay for that usage.”

Moving databases to serverless

Since moving to SQL Database serverless, Icertis has reduced individual database costs by up to 70 percent. It has also eliminated all DevOps overhead related to the previous solution. The company’s DevOps team has refocused resources on higher-value activities, such as identifying opportunities to provide better services and build new automation initiatives.

Icertis has moved many SQL Database instances to the serverless tier, with the potential to add many hundreds more in the future. Moving workloads from one compute tier to another proved easy, too, requiring no changes to the company’s existing application or prior advanced technical know-how.

“We’ve realized three major benefits,” says Rao. “One: we only pay for what we use. Two: relying on serverless automatic scaling instead of our own home-grown solution frees more time for innovation. And three: it helps our customers always get the right performance levels they need, day or night.”

Icertis has put itself in an even better position to achieve its mission of becoming the go-to contract management platform of the world with guaranteed fidelity, performance, and availability. “Azure SQL Database serverless enables us to offer an even more robust and resilient solution, helping us build deeper partnerships with our customers and go to market stronger than ever before.” says Rao.

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