A 12 months of Constructing: MoEngage Engineering Assessment 2022

2022 has been a 12 months of quiet however efficient work. There have been no massive bang initiatives from engineering, however we slowly and steadily knocked off among the important tech money owed. On this article, I’ll talk about a couple of milestones for Engineering at MoEngage.

Reliability at Scale

Reliability metrics point out how glad our prospects are. These SLAs are measured for each product and reviewed month-to-month to make sure we ship on our buyer commitments. In 2021, we discovered SLA breaches in a couple of areas and labored to enhance them in 2022. Listed here are the enhancements we’ve achieved, together with the outcomes:

1. Frequency capping helps our prospects create giant campaigns with out worrying about sending too many messages to their finish prospects. (An instance of a frequency cap setting could be – Sending solely 5 communication in 10 days per consumer.) Earlier, our code wouldn’t scale in line with our necessities, which meant we have been throwing extra redis on the downside. At present we aren’t solely capable of scale successfully but in addition optimize prices by as much as 70%. This mission saved us lots of {dollars} and helped ship on buyer SLAs.
2. Our Engineering Supervisor for QA ensures the crew is continually upskilling and prepped for world greatest practices. Our QA crew gained ISTQB certifications and goals so as to add extra certifications within the coming years. These initiatives assist our groups enhance their expertise and implement world greatest practices that assist us ship merchandise with minimal bugs and profit our prospects.
3. Final 12 months, we fashioned a crew to deal with core FE enhancements and prioritized pending initiatives. One such mission was the lazy loading of some libraries to enhance our dashboard loading occasions. Now we have improved construct occasions by 32% and upgraded our node model. We launched caching in a couple of areas to enhance our dashboard lighthouse rating from 62 to 70.
4. Customers within the section (UIS) as a service is a base for our prospects’ personalization providers. We confronted some scale issues and got down to remedy them final 12 months. Now we have modified the stack and achieved 10x write efficiency and 3x latency discount on the actual value.
5. Flows is the preferred product at MoEngage – virtually all our prospects use it. We continually enhance this product to assist our prospects obtain extra. Final 12 months, the crew considerably decreased the on-call, measured, and improved SLAs to satisfy these close to real-time expectations. Why weren’t we in a position to do that earlier? We needed to steadiness between the prices and SLAs right here – to satisfy the SLAs, we needed to throw lots of infrastructure. Although the crew hasn’t modified the stack, they achieved SLA and value optimization with separation of consumers and code optimizations.

We imagine in difficult the established order and dealing towards our buyer’s wants. The need to ship the appropriate know-how to be used circumstances retains our crew motivated and challenged.

Effectivity to Drive Sustainable Development

Each firm must discover a approach to function effectively. At MoEngage, we now have all the time adopted the rules of sustainable development and maintain a detailed eye on effectivity as an organizational metric. Final 12 months was a wonderful begin on this route, and I’m assured that MoEngage will see a substantial enchancment on this space going ahead. Listed here are a couple of areas we improved in effectivity and outcomes:

1. We recognized Oncall load as an enormous space of enchancment. Final 12 months, chopping the on-call pagers was recognized as a precedence for our groups. Whereas some groups may cut back the on-call toil by 50%, others had zero on-call pagers. There may be much less context switching, or pagers, extra reliability to our prospects, and pleased coding for our groups.
2. As a SAAS firm, our builders generally have to get entangled within the help chain, one other main merchandise on our on-call schedule. Now we have consciously determined to coach our help groups and develop sufficient documentation to remove any help escalations that may come to the engineering crew. I’m excited to share that the escalations have been decreased by greater than 50%. Consequently, we served extra prospects with much less bandwidth.
3. Considered one of our most outstanding information facilities has gotten massive; any slight glitch would have an effect on many shoppers. We had 3 DCs and launched our fourth DC within the US area to satisfy the info residency necessities and help higher SLAs. Whereas launching the DCs, we had our share of learnings, however ultimately, we went reside. This additionally means the devs needn’t fear about scale issues for a while.

Price Optimization

Serving prospects on the proper value is vital for any enterprise. Our pricing is easy, and we invoice our prospects based mostly on occasions and MAUs. However, solely a few of our merchandise are instantly proportionally used on the occasions or MAUs, making it difficult for the engineering crew to foretell the prices and maintain them in verify.

1. We tried to resolve this downside by growing FUPs and pricing fashions for brand spanking new merchandise that don’t scale with MAUs. We constructed an inner service that may inform us how a lot we spend on a buyer to serve a product. Final 12 months, we rolled out this inner service to most of our providers, and we will predict our serving worth for all merchandise with 90% accuracy. This mission helps us in 2 methods – get the pricing fashions proper for brand spanking new gross sales offers and determine prospects who’re overusing our merchandise based mostly on their pricing.

Knowledge Privateness and Safety a Precedence

You may by no means over-emphasize information safety and consumer privateness. But, there’s additionally a restrict on how a lot you’ll be able to obtain at a given time. We perceive our prospects’ issues about client information safeguards, and we’re continually striving to reassure our prospects. We made vital investments in safety in 2021, and the development continued over the last 12 months.

1. We gained the SOC2 Type2 certification and CSA star Stage 2, which fits a protracted approach to guarantee our prospects about our safety practices. I imagine certifications are a consequence of strengthening our practices and shouldn’t be our main objective.
2. Now we have built-in most of our inner merchandise with Okta to ease onboarding and offboarding practices. Because of our safety crew, we now have revamped entry management and outlined how our groups entry inner instruments.
3. Our Infosec crew has additionally launched whitepapers to sort out the ever-growing information residency necessities throughout the nations. We made tweaks to our merchandise, akin to launching the PII tokenized sending function that permits our prospects to retailer the info of their area and work with MoEngage answer that exists in different areas.

Stronger Crew and Tradition

Whereas we fear about growing industry-leading merchandise and know-how, the crew’s well being and satisfaction are additionally my focus. Our group’s tradition encourages the crew to talk up and act on suggestions as a lot as attainable. Listed here are some milestones we achieved in 2022:

1. We re-opened our workplace in August final 12 months – we adopted a hybrid work mannequin, and in-office days have been elective. Nevertheless, groups may expertise the distinction between WFH and in-office work days. In-person conferences helped with sooner decision-making, and data switch was faster. The social side is the added icing on the cake; groups felt they weren’t remoted and have been a part of one thing greater.
2. Now we have additionally efficiently transferred some crew members from the Enterprise departments to the Engineering departments. Engineering at MoEngage is all the time open to the appropriate expertise, regardless of their background.
3. By November, we had accomplished our management hunt and had a stable crew with wealthy and various expertise. I’m hopeful that we’ll remedy lots of structural and course of gaps with the skilled and gifted management we now have assembled now.

Different Highlights

1. We envision MoEngage as a multi-cloud platform. We did a couple of POCs on Azure final 12 months and altered our constructing rules to not have a look at AWS providers as the one approach to construct the software program for our prospects. Any resolution we take concerning the stack must be multi-cloud suitable. We are going to proceed to spend money on multi-cloud methods this 12 months.
2. We accomplished our first open-source mission to assist these attempting to find if they’ve alarms on their AWS infrastructure. The hyperlink to the mission is given right here.
3. We had our first hybrid hackathon, with a couple of groups within the workplace and others on-line. This time, we took our hackathon initiatives to our product roadmap and are shut to creating them reside for our prospects. We, as a tradition, give area to out-of-the-box concepts and pursue them.

Alternatives 2023

We began final 12 months with lots to perform. We have been capable of accommodate some advert hoc duties, which implies we missed out on a couple of deliberate initiatives.

1. We aimed to roll out a brand new stack for information ingestion to all our prospects, however we may do it just for 5% of them, which is manner behind our targets. A big studying for us has been the best way to make the appropriate decisions for the tech stack after we alter the elemental performance of the corporate and the best way to roll it out into manufacturing. I made many errors, however I discovered lots right here, and I’m certain our crew and people on this mission have their share of learnings.
2. We couldn’t prioritize the tech stack revamp for Dynamic Product Messaging. The present stack doesn’t scale as effectively with our ever-growing buyer necessities. We have to guarantee upkeep twice a month to repairs the prevailing stack. We hope to offer a greater expertise to our prospects and crew members engaged on this product in 2023.
3. Our new DC(information heart) launch took longer than deliberate. We recognized the issue and launched yet one more DC in a document time. MoEngage has 5 DCs now, and our SRE crew has accomplished a incredible job of creating this occur. That they had lots of persistence with these sudden DC launches, and we now have made our DC launches sooner.
4. We needed to rework our K8s stack to repair its fundamentals and nonetheless wanted to satisfy our K8s targets final 12 months. One thing we had set because the goal once more this 12 months, however with some rework already accomplished, we hope we will do higher on this space.

At MoEngage, we proceed studying, don’t shrink back from acknowledging failures, and repair the tech as wanted. Buyer obsession, innovation, possession, and humility are a couple of cultural values that outline the MoEngage Engineering crew.

As I look in direction of 2023, I need to thank the crew that’s been a part of all of the hits, and I hope we’ll obtain many extra milestones collectively this 12 months.