A Yr of Constructing: MoEngage Engineering Assessment 2022

2022 has been a yr of quiet however efficient work. There have been no massive bang initiatives from engineering, however we slowly and steadily knocked off a number of 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 below are the enhancements we’ve achieved, together with the outcomes:

1. Frequency capping helps our prospects create massive 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 keeping with our necessities, which meant we had been throwing extra redis on the downside. Right now we’re not solely capable of scale successfully but in addition 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 crew is continually upskilling and prepped for world finest 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 finest practices that assist us ship merchandise with minimal bugs and profit our prospects.
3. Final yr, we fashioned a crew to give attention to core FE enhancements and prioritized pending initiatives. One such challenge 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 companies. We confronted some scale issues and got down to resolve them final yr. Now we have modified the stack and achieved 10x write efficiency and 3x latency discount on the precise value.
5. Flows is the preferred product at MoEngage – nearly all our prospects use it. We always enhance this product to assist our prospects obtain extra. Final yr, the crew 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 crew hasn’t modified the stack, they achieved SLA and value optimization with a superb separation of consumers and code optimizations.

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

Effectivity to Drive Sustainable Development

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

1. We recognized Oncall load as a large space of enchancment. Final yr, 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 typically 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 diminished by greater than 50%. In consequence, we served extra prospects with much less bandwidth.
3. One among our most distinguished knowledge facilities has gotten massive; 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 information residency necessities and help higher SLAs. Whereas launching the DCs, we had our share of learnings, however finally, we went dwell. This additionally means the devs needn’t fear about scale issues for a while.

Price Optimization

Serving prospects on the proper value is important 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 straight proportionally used on the occasions or MAUs, making it difficult for the engineering crew to foretell the prices and maintain them in test.

1. We tried to resolve this downside by creating FUPs and pricing fashions for brand 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 companies, and we are able to predict our serving worth for all merchandise with 90% accuracy. This challenge helps us in 2 methods – get the pricing fashions proper for brand new gross sales offers and determine prospects who’re overusing our merchandise based mostly on their pricing.

Knowledge Privateness and Safety a Precedence

You possibly can by no means over-emphasize knowledge safety and consumer privateness. But, there’s additionally a restrict on how a lot you possibly can obtain at a given time. We perceive our prospects’ considerations about shopper knowledge safeguards, and we’re always striving to reassure our prospects. 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 matches a protracted solution to guarantee our prospects about our safety practices. I consider certifications are a consequence of strengthening our practices and shouldn’t be our major purpose.
2. Now we have built-in most of our inner merchandise with Okta to ease onboarding and offboarding practices. Due to 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 knowledge residency necessities throughout the nations. We made tweaks to our merchandise, equivalent to launching the PII tokenized sending characteristic that permits our prospects to retailer the information of their area and work with MoEngage answer that exists in different areas.

Stronger Group and Tradition

Whereas we fear about creating industry-leading merchandise and expertise, 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 below 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 had been elective. Nevertheless, groups may expertise the distinction between WFH and in-office work days. In-person conferences helped with quicker decision-making, and information switch was faster. The social side is the added icing on the cake; groups felt they weren’t remoted and had 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 at all times open to the suitable expertise, irrespective of their background.
3. By November, we had accomplished our management hunt and had a strong crew with wealthy and various expertise. I’m hopeful that we are going to resolve quite a lot of structural and course of gaps with the skilled and proficient 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 yr and altered our constructing rules to not take a look at AWS companies as the one solution to construct the software program for our prospects. Any determination 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 attempting 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 dwell for our prospects. 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 had 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 knowledge ingestion to all our prospects, however we may do it just for 5% of them, which is method behind our targets. A big studying for us has been easy methods to make the suitable decisions for the tech stack once we alter the basic performance of the corporate and easy methods to roll it out into manufacturing. I made many errors, however I discovered so much right here, and I’m certain our crew 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 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(knowledge heart) launch took longer than deliberate. We recognized the issue and launched yet another DC in a document time. MoEngage has 5 DCs now, and our SRE crew has achieved a incredible job of creating this occur. They’d quite a lot of persistence with these sudden DC launches, and we now have made our DC launches quicker.
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 achieved, we hope we are able to 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 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 yr.