HomePortfolioEnabling Scalability and Improving Maintenance of an SMM Platform for E-commerce

Enabling Scalability and Improving Maintenance of an SMM Platform for E-commerce

.NET
Cloud-Native
JavaScript
Marketing and Advertising
Node.js

Working with Altoros, a startup migrated to a new technology stack for better scalability, performance, and maintenance of its social media marketing / e-commerce platform.

Enabling Scalability and Improving Maintenance of an SMM Platform for E-commerce

About the project

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • The new technology stack—based on Microsoft Azure—ensured scalability and easier maintenance of the system.
  • The load speed for most of the pages was accelerated 15x.
  • With the product launched, the customer has got a new revenue channel, focusing on business development instead of coding.

The customer

The customer is a startup company that operates in Norway. It offers an integrated solution for simplifying social media marketing (SMM) campaigns and e-commerce.

The customer’s system enables its users to easily manage landing pages / blogs and promote products and services through a range of social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) with a few clicks. The product is mainly targeted at small / mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in Northern Europe (Scandinavia and the U.K.).

The need

When the customer engaged with Altoros, its system was in development for some time. The idea was to build a platform that could compete with other similar products in terms of functionality, speed, and price.

However, the platform’s performance needed improvement: it took up to 15 seconds for many pages to load. The customer also understood that the outdated technology stack will possess issues with scalability and maintenance very soon.

Therefore, the company decided to migrate to a cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure, and turned to Altoros to accelerate the process and add new functionality.

The challenge

Migration to innovative technologies entailed the following difficulties:

  • The Aurelia framework—chosen for developing a client side (CMS, publishing, etc.)—was still in beta and required some bug fixing.
  • The DocumentDB database had limitations for paging and data retrieval.
  • The platform required interaction with numerous social media platform APIs, which were frequently changing during the development process. So, appropriate modifications of POST / GET requests were needed.

The solution

To enable scalability and maintenance, the team standardized on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, reproducing all the business logic of the legacy system step by step.

For creating and accelerating interactive front-end components—such as chats and notifications—Altoros relied on Socket.IO (with Node.js at the back end).

After detailed comparison, the Aurelia framework was utilized for implementing the main CMS engine. In addition to improved performance, it enabled users to create web pages with an intuitive WYSIWYG and distribute the content with minimum effort. The technology also enabled engineers to build a mobile app for the system. As a result of migration from the Durandal framework to Aurelia, it takes just one second to load a page now.

However, since Aurelia was still in beta, the developers at Altoros monitored its new releases and made appropriate changes. The team also fixed a couple of bugs in Aurelia and introduced pull requests to its official GitHub repository, which were later accepted and merged with the framework.

To overcome paging and data retrieval limitations of the DocumentDB database, our experts created a number of stored procedures.

Engineers at Altoros also enabled the search functionality by tags, users, and keywords across all the social networks involved.

Finally, the developers tracked updates for about a dozen of APIs to modify the POST / GET requests accordingly and to ensure proper interaction of the platform with social media platforms.

The outcome

Cooperation with Altoros helped the customer to accelerate time-to-market and improve scalability of its platform. In addition to this, the Microsoft Azure stack also ensured easier maintenance of the solution.

Migration to the new technologies improved the speed of page load by 15 times. With strong focus on performance, the system can now compete favorably against other products on the market—at better pricing options.

After the system had been delivered to a “focus group” for evaluation, the publishing process was also simplified for better user experience.

The product is now spreading across small / mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in Northern Europe (Scandinavia and the U.K.).

Technology stack

Server platform

Microsoft Azure

Programming languages

JavaScript, C#

Technologies

ASP.NET MVC, Aurelia, Node.js, Socket.IO

Database

DocumentDB

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588