4 Yubl case study – architecture highlights, lessons learned
This chapter covers
- The original Yubl architecture and its problems
- The new architecture on serverless and the architectural decisions behind it
- Strategies and patterns for moving an existing monolith application to serverless
- Lessons learned from this migration
In April 2016, I joined a social network based in London called Yubl. There I inherited a monolithic backend system written in Node.js and running on a handful of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The original system took 2.5 years to implement and had a long list of performance and scalability issues once it went live. With a small team of six engineers, we managed to move the platform to serverless over the course of 6 months. Along the way, we added many new features and addressed the existing performance and scalability issues. We reduced feature delivery time from months to days, and in some cases, hours. And though cost was not the main motivation for undertaking this transformation, we made a 95% saving on our AWS bill in the process.