Brabble Inc. - MongoDB Migration to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Brabble Inc., the creator of the “All-In-One Social Media & e-commerce App” was facing database and server issues with their application in terms of scalability and performance. Their mobile application was riddled with issues that was creating an unsatisfactory user experience. As a result, adoption was uneven and falling.

Brabble decided to bring in mLogica’s software team to help remediate these business critical issues. The team did a holistic assessment of the app and its component elements and their relative strengths and weaknesses. They found the MongoDB platform, which hosted the app, robust with full backups. The decision was made to migrate Brabble’s MongoDB onto the MongoDb.com infrastructure, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition, the server software backend would be hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), thereby freeing an application which had been hampered by resource constraints, such as lack of rapid scaling of access and usage, all within a flexible and low-cost, yet tightly controlled and highly secure environment.

To ensure the platform was compatible with EC2 requirements, the team spent approximately one month identifying hardware and software specifications for this task and set upon the design to ensure a smooth and successful migration. The team was expecting a lift-and-shift deployment to AWS, however this proved not to be the case. While some parts of the system were lift-and-shift (the MongoDB data migration), other parts were not, such as server infrastructure.

Brabble’s server platform, Node.js, which powered the App’s system architecture and its user-interface functions, turned out to be the real problem. It had minimal security and separation of concerns, it also appeared that previous developers working on coding and recoding the software had damaged rather than improved the app’s original functionality. This coding problem, which had made simple tasks such as logging in, email entry, or clicking through button operations a user headache had led to widespread dissatisfaction with the App.

Therefore, mLogica’s software development team worked parallel to the migration process. This involved re-designing the infrastructure to ensure it had proper security and separate environments for development and QA, as well as completely recoding or making significant functional changes to all of the major software features. As the changes were deployed, the team had to ensure they worked with speed and accuracy. Meanwhile Brabble’s social media integration was also re-configured, as both Twitter and Facebook had made significant changes to their APIs that had left their integration code invalid and unworkable on the old software.

Once this process was completed, all components of Brabble’s system architecture were tested by the mLogica team to ensure the app worked at optimal levels, allowing users to experience seamless functionality in posting to all forms of media with no limitations. Now, operators will be able to tap into Brabble’s e-commerce promise, able to buy and sell products on the site directly through the app with Brabble’s patented ‘*StarTags’ technology. Best of all, the highly scalable EC2 environment underlying the app means that changes in the volume and velocity of usage brought on through rapid growth will no longer be an issue, as they had been previously.