Virtual Engagement at Scale
Jigsaw's biggest problem was their inability to expand the business due to reaching the limits of their product's current implementation and setup on a single AWS EC2 instance. Jigsaw had to take a new direction to rework and scale its solution to adequately meet the needs of its customers and allow it within three months to support 6x more users than they were able to handle at the time. Additionally, due to the company’s rapid growth, Jigsaw needed to develop a solution to support 170x more active users in the following two years.
After multiple meetings discussing the best course of action to take, our team and the Jigsaw team partnered up to determine the major challenges we had to solve:
First, we started by scaling up the development team already working with Jigsaw. We brought the project professionals extensive skills and technological knowledge, which were much needed for the challenge. Our project management team created separate, highly efficient, self-organized cross-functional development teams.
In 2017, it was reported that in 2020 the support for some of the technologies used in the product would be officially ceased. As a result, our team took the initiative to analyze the impact this could have on the client’s platform and, based on the results, went to Jigsaw with a proposition for the existing front-end product to be rewritten from scratch using HTML5.
The backend side and some other parts of the system were to be kept the same to serve both the old and the new version of conference products. However, many existing features had to be reworked to become compatible with the latest technology. Jigsaw Board of Directors approved the investment, and in January 2018, we began working on the development of the new version of the Product. This later proved to be a critical step for the survival and success of the company, which earned us Jigsaw’s respect and gratitude.
Later in April 2019, our team helped Jigsaw to scale up their business. They had just secured a deal with a large school and had to improve their solution so that it could support thousands of students online and auto-scale in response to the load. We developed their product bringing it to another level of complexity, capability, and scalability, which allowed Jigsaw to compete with the most significant competitors on the market.
The team doubled in size, reaching 30 people in a very short time, who could upgrade the platform in just three months, allowing cross-version communication and introducing a scalable solution for direct web communication. They enabled the Jigsaw software to auto-scale with every user online and dynamically allocate AWS instances as needed, allowing it to support more than 30,000 active participants simultaneously.
The dev team built a new cloud-based infrastructure using Kubernetes on top of AWS services. To take advantage of the new infrastructure and achieve the highest level of scalability, our team introduced a microservices architecture that was used to rebuild most of the services. As for the product delivery process, the DevOps team automated and secured the process by implementing full-scale CI/CD utilizing Concourse CI.
Prime has gained the trust of Jigsaw to be responsible for the in-house organization, management, and execution of the development process, as well as for project management, QA, and support. We also lead the product management and planning, together with Jigsaw.
