Accelerating DevOps processes with Microtica

Since 2017, Vertt has been on a mission to fill the very few voids that exist in the Swiss transportation system, building a ride-hailing app that provides a reliable, responsible and secure transportation experience. They innovate to provide the society with a solution that people don’t even think they need.

Built on the latest microservice technology and following the latest industry trends, Vertt uses AWS cloud from the very beginning.

Vertt’s team consists of full-stack and mobile developers. Yet, they had quite some challenges working with cloud technologies and combining different DevOps tools.

Cloud setup and infrastructure

Firstly, they needed a number of plug-ins to get started and use Jenkins as a build orchestration tool. Very quickly, more challenges came up. Access control management, configuration usability, and scaling began to overwhelm the developers and defocus them from their daily tasks.

The team at Vertt was using Jenkins as part of their DevOps process. Even when the application was still in its development phase, whenever the team required to manage a release, they felt as they needed to outsource DevOps proffesionals. The limited release management meant that the team was often forced to bring in both the full-stack and mobile developers which meant increasing time-to-launch and draining developer hours.

While exploring alternatives, they realised Microtica checked off all of their boxes. So, using the ready-made components and the custom component generator that Microtica provides, a backend developer from Vertt set up the architecture of the system all by himself.

Vertt’s environments consist of the following components:

• AWS S3
• Kubernetes cluster
• Serverless MySql database
• ElastiCache managed Redis in-memory datastore
• and six more custom components they created by themselves with the component generator

The developers proved that the idea was feasible in the required frame. However, now they arrived at a point where they needed reinforcements. The team began to grow, but so did the number of problems. Tracking and accountability of various team members became great issues. As most of the deployments and builds were done via a single user, tracking was only at the code level provided by the source control tool, in this case, Git.

With Microtica, they now have control over the entire system. Moreover, the collaboration between team members became much easier. Each of them has the right permissions for the tasks they have to perform. This gives them full accountability of every event happening in the background.

Finally, Microtica’s user-friendly infrastructure configuration relieves them of the repetitive tasks they need to perform when setting up an infrastructure.

Microservice delivery

Vertt handles quality rides with a complex business logic that needs full-time support by the running technology. They have 13 microservices supporting the mobile app and the web admin portal. Functionalities like ride-hailing, price calculation, payment, rating are all divided into separate microservices performing their specific task. This is very useful as there are parts of the application that don’t require frequent changes. On the other hand, functionalities like ride-client matching are parts that the team constantly wants to improve with each release.

Microtica prefers a specific definition of the microservices to perform, build, and deploy processes. So, migrating the first microservices at the beginning was a task that required time and documentation. But, soon after that, it became a very easy and short task, because they used our microservice generator. Now, if they need to create a new microservice, it would be up and running in less then a day.

The platform allowed them to use Kubernetes without having in-depth knowledge about it. They could implement the Kubernetes component that abstracts all the complexity around setting up and configuring AWS specific parameters. They are now way more flexible as they build and deploy microservices on Kubernetes within minutes.

Product releases

After developing and testing the product in-house for several months, the Vertt team decided to proceed to the next phase. This meant organizing and releasing a beta testing period for the mobile app.

VertVertt employees performed the beta testing. They had two days when they could order a Vertt ride and get to certain points of the city.

The rides were performed by test drivers. They allowed everyone in the office to live the experience and give feedback about what they had created.

For these purposes, they had to create a new environment where they would deploy a stable version of the software. At the same time, they had to work on new updates on the Dev environment. Taking advantage of the Replicate functionality the new environment was ready in a day. Ready with 13 microservices up and running!

Today, they have 3 environments (Dev, Test, Prod) that they maintain on a daily basis. They love that the versioning is straightforward. Moreover, you can choose what you want to deploy at any moment in time.

Microtica made it extremely easy to deliver new versions of Vertt’s product on a daily basis throughout multiple environments.

Vertt, powered by Microtica, penetrated the Swiss market in only a year. Their product easily compares with world-known giants like Uber and Lyft. As a startup, Vertt has the vision to become a one-stop mobility solution for all of its users’ transportation needs. That’s why they offer:

• the best local driving experience
• perfectly selected drivers
• secure communication

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