A 12 months of Constructing: MoEngage Engineering Evaluate 2022

2022 has been a yr of quiet however efficient work. There have been no huge bang initiatives from engineering, however we slowly and steadily knocked off a number of the important tech money owed. On this article, I’ll focus on a couple of milestones for Engineering at MoEngage.

Reliability at Scale

Reliability metrics point out how happy our clients 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 clients create giant campaigns with out worrying about sending too many messages to their finish clients. (An instance of a frequency cap setting could be – Sending solely 5 communication in 10 days per consumer.) Earlier, our code wouldn’t scale based on our necessities, which meant we have been throwing extra redis on the drawback. At this time we’re not solely capable of scale successfully but additionally optimize prices by as much as 70%. This challenge saved us quite a lot of {dollars} and helped ship on buyer SLAs.
2. Our Engineering Supervisor for QA ensures the group is continually upskilling and prepped for international finest practices. Our QA group gained ISTQB certifications and goals so as to add extra certifications within the coming years. These initiatives assist our groups enhance their abilities and implement international finest practices that assist us ship merchandise with minimal bugs and profit our clients.
3. Final yr, we fashioned a group to deal with core FE enhancements and prioritized pending initiatives. One such challenge was the lazy loading of some libraries to enhance our dashboard loading instances. We’ve got improved construct instances 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 phase (UIS) as a service is a base for our clients’ personalization providers. We confronted some scale issues and got down to resolve them final yr. We’ve got modified the stack and achieved 10x write efficiency and 3x latency discount on the precise value.
5. Flows is the most well-liked product at MoEngage – nearly all our clients use it. We consistently enhance this product to assist our clients obtain extra. Final yr, the group considerably diminished 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 quite a lot of infrastructure. Although the group hasn’t modified the stack, they achieved SLA and price optimization with an excellent separation of consumers and code optimizations.

We consider in difficult the established order and dealing towards our buyer’s wants. The will to ship the proper expertise to be used instances retains our group motivated and challenged.

Effectivity to Drive Sustainable Development

Each firm must discover a option to function effectively. At MoEngage, we’ve got all the time adopted the ideas of sustainable progress and maintain a detailed eye on effectivity as an organizational metric. Final yr was a superb begin on this path, 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 yr, chopping the on-call pagers was recognized as a precedence for our groups. Whereas some groups might scale back the on-call toil by 50%, others had zero on-call pagers. There’s much less context switching, or pagers, extra reliability to our clients, and completely happy coding for our groups.
2. As a SAAS firm, our builders typically have to get entangled within the help chain, one other main merchandise on our on-call schedule. We’ve got consciously determined to coach our help groups and develop sufficient documentation to remove any help escalations that may come to the engineering group. I’m excited to share that the escalations have been diminished by greater than 50%. Consequently, we served extra clients with much less bandwidth.
3. One among our most distinguished knowledge facilities has gotten huge; any slight glitch would have an effect on many purchasers. We had 3 DCs and launched our fourth DC within the US area to meet the info residency necessities and help higher SLAs. Whereas launching the DCs, we had our share of learnings, however finally, we went reside. This additionally means the devs needn’t fear about scale issues for a while.

Price Optimization

Serving clients on the proper value is vital for any enterprise. Our pricing is straightforward, and we invoice our clients primarily based 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 group to foretell the prices and maintain them in verify.

1. We tried to resolve this drawback 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 yr, we rolled out this inner service to most of our providers, and we will predict our serving value for all merchandise with 90% accuracy. This challenge helps us in 2 methods – get the pricing fashions proper for brand spanking new gross sales offers and determine clients who’re overusing our merchandise primarily based on their pricing.

Information Privateness and Safety a Precedence

You may by no means over-emphasize knowledge safety and consumer privateness. But, there’s additionally a restrict on how a lot you may obtain at a given time. We perceive our clients’ considerations about shopper knowledge safeguards, and we’re consistently striving to reassure our clients. We made vital investments in safety in 2021, and the development continued over the last yr.

1. We gained the SOC2 Type2 certification and CSA star Stage 2, which fits an extended option to guarantee our clients about our safety practices. I consider certifications are a consequence of strengthening our practices and shouldn’t be our major aim.
2. We’ve got built-in most of our inner merchandise with Okta to ease onboarding and offboarding practices. Due to our safety group, we’ve got revamped entry management and outlined how our groups entry inner instruments.
3. Our Infosec group has additionally launched whitepapers to deal with the ever-growing knowledge residency necessities throughout the international locations. We made tweaks to our merchandise, resembling launching the PII tokenized sending function that enables our clients to retailer the info of their area and work with MoEngage resolution that exists in different areas.

Stronger Workforce and Tradition

Whereas we fear about growing industry-leading merchandise and expertise, the group’s well being and satisfaction are additionally my focus. Our group’s tradition encourages the group 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 yr – we adopted a hybrid work mannequin, and in-office days have been non-obligatory. Nevertheless, groups might 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 facet is the added icing on the cake; groups felt they weren’t remoted and have been a part of one thing larger.
2. We’ve got additionally efficiently transferred some group members from the Enterprise departments to the Engineering departments. Engineering at MoEngage is all the time open to the proper expertise, regardless of their background.
3. By November, we had accomplished our management hunt and had a stable group with wealthy and various expertise. I’m hopeful that we’ll resolve quite a lot of structural and course of gaps with the skilled and proficient management we’ve got assembled now.

Different Highlights

1. We envision MoEngage as a multi-cloud platform. We did a couple of POCs on Azure final yr and adjusted our constructing ideas to not have a look at AWS providers as the one option to construct the software program for our clients. Any resolution we take relating to the stack must be multi-cloud appropriate. We are going to proceed to put money into multi-cloud programs this yr.
2. We accomplished our first open-source challenge to assist these making an attempt to find if they’ve alarms on their AWS infrastructure. The hyperlink to the challenge 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 clients. We, as a tradition, give area to out-of-the-box concepts and pursue them.

Alternatives 2023

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

1. We aimed to roll out a brand new stack for knowledge ingestion to all our clients, however we might do it just for 5% of them, which is method behind our targets. A big studying for us has been tips on how to make the proper selections for the tech stack once we alter the elemental performance of the corporate and tips on how to roll it out into manufacturing. I made many errors, however I realized quite a bit right here, and I’m certain our group and people on this challenge 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 maintenance the prevailing stack. We hope to supply a greater expertise to our clients and group members engaged on this product in 2023.
3. Our new DC(knowledge heart) launch took longer than deliberate. We recognized the issue and launched yet one more DC in a file time. MoEngage has 5 DCs now, and our SRE group has accomplished a incredible job of creating this occur. That they had quite a lot of endurance with these sudden DC launches, and we’ve got 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 yr. One thing we had set because the goal once more this yr, however with some rework already accomplished, we hope we will do higher on this space.

At MoEngage, we proceed studying, don’t draw 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 group.

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