Challenge
MediaHQ was already a #1 tool in Ireland for sharing the news with all kinds of media, from local journalists to national broadcasters. Scaling to UK market was a natural next step on their business journey. The goal was to do it in less than 12 months.
Successful launch in UK required facing few challenges. First of all we had to prepare the platform to handle up to 10× more users. At the same time it had to efficiently operate on 12× larger database of media outlets and contacts. Database itself wasn't at that time capable of reflecting all the nuances of UK media industry.
Last but not least, we had to offer additional search and media intelligence features, to make MediaHQ stand out from the competion on UK market.
Project goals
Solution
- Launching a SaaS product on a significantly larger market requires its architecture and infrastructure to be both scalable and flexible. It has to be ready to scale quickly when product gains traction, but also keep the costs of infrastructure low before it happens.
Containerization, database separation, adding abstraction to filesystem or sessionless authentication are just an examples of many tweaks introduced to enable flexible scaling. - After removing all scalability obstacles we were able to migrate the platform from a single server to the Google Cloud infrastructure. We also used Kubernetes to automate product deployment, scaling, and management, which reduced necessary infrastructure administration to bare minimum.
- MediaHQ had a great search & discovery feature beloved by the users. But to compete on a new market it had to be outstanding. That is why together with MediaHQ researchers and product team we created a new, top-notch one - based on Elasticsearch and inspired by Google's idea of a single search field.
Packed with intelligent features like synonym search, typo correction, stemming, smart contextual suggestions... and light-speed fast at the same time. We also used the domain knowledge of MediaHQ researchers to create search algorithms that promote more relevant and high quality search results. - To stand out on a UK market we also introduced couple of new media intelligence features like news performance metrics & comparison or industry trends. We also had to redesign and migrate the complete media database, from Ireland focused structures to more universal and flexible model.
Outcomes
Introducing scalable architecture, optimizing performance & migrating to cloud enabled successful launch in 12 times bigger UK. Although MediaHQ is just starting to gain traction on the new market, it is already prepared to handle over 10 times more users.
The new data model and search algorithms reduced search times by 92% despite the 12× larger database. Additional intelligence features not only helped to stand out in UK but also brought MediaHQ new customers on the local market.
And all of that in just... 9 months.
With no downtime to existing users.
Technologies
- JavaScript
- AngularJS
- RxJS
- PHP/Symfony
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- Redis
- PHPUnit
- PHPUnit
- Cypress
- PHPStan
- Sentry
- Docker
- DigitalOcean
- DataDog
- GitLab CI/CD
Have any questions about the project?
If you are interested in more details about this project or in need of similar services — do not hesitate to contact me directly through LinkedIn.
I was leading this project and will do my best to answer any question.
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