Launched in 2014, Bridestory is a one-stop shop for brides looking for wedding inspiration and connecting with potential wedding suppliers. Based in Indonesia, Bridestory's app has a rapidly expanding user base, including users in the Philippines and Singapore, and currently has about 700,000 visitors. Two years after its founding, the startup was going through growing pains brought on by its monolithic architecture. Slow iterations and difficulties with deployment and scaling lead to delays in getting to market, which is the priority.
Bridestory built its original architecture in the AWS Cloud and began consulting with AWS architects about migrating to a more agile, modern application architecture based on containers.
Bridestory is using Amazon cloud technology services including: Amazon Elastic Container Service Amazon ECS/Amazon EKS, relational database service Amazon RDS, database migration service Amazon DMS.
Doni Hanafi, Bridestory's CTO, and his team started using Amazon's container orchestration service (Amazon ECS), which breaks down the application into smaller services. With time-to-market and reliability as key metrics, Bridestory plans to deploy updates every few days to reduce failure rates.
The first three to four months were spent exploring various technology stacks to find the right infrastructure for the targeted workloads, with the aim of finding a solution that would increase agility through automated upgrades. The startup then began to decouple applications further, starting with building new functionality in a microservices environment.
Bridestory uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store all business data and found Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS) useful during the migration process. "By using Amazon DMS, we can back up data in real time and synchronize data from the old RDS database in the monolithic architecture to the new microservices database," said Hanafi. "Also, we can easily create backups in Amazon RDS, and we will Use it regularly in our BI tools. The backups are very reliable and we haven't had any major data issues so far."
The new microservices architecture changes the way operations are done. Bridestory also launched a new app called Parentstory using its containerized infrastructure. He explained, "Isolation is the key to our new multi-tenant microservices model, and we have been exploring with the architects of Amazon Web Technologies how to use the same architecture and source code to operate completely different brands, customers and databases. This "recycleable" approach enabled the team to release the Parentstory app almost three times faster than Bridestory.
Hanafi's team has also become more efficient by using Amazon Web Services. He concluded: "Currently we are moving to a more general fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service (Amazon EKS), which will allow us to be more flexible in isolating resources. With the help of Amazon cloud technology and services, We are exploring new ways of learning and experimenting, which are critical for engineers and improve employee retention.”