State Procurement Monitoring

01. Business Challenge

The system is made for those who monitor and analyze state procurement activities in bulk. It proved itself especially efficient on tracking behavior of both buyers and suppliers across various groups of commodity goods or services.

The project history took off from one of the largest outsourcing companies in CEE turned out to be incapable of building a working product spending more than $1M within a year. That’s where our team took over committing to tight schedule and highest quality standards.

02. Solution

The product we were given lacked performance and scalability and used to have data loss issues. While the overall technology stack responded well to general requirements the system design did not, which led to exponential rise of the hardware expenses and constant outages.

Our team moved from shared DB integration model to IronMQ-based queue model. Documents were moved to AWS S3 storage. Sphinx engine was reconfigured as per the best-practice recommendations and split onto several instances raising performance up to 0.5 sec per search. MSSQL full-text searched was replaced by Sphinx. Static information and look-up tables were moved to NoSQL storage.

03. Result

Within 8 months, we released a scalable, stable, maintainable and efficiently working product demonstrating about 40% cost-cutting in project budget compared to the larges CEE software outsourcer.

04. Team:

5 developers
2 QA engineers

05. Duration:

8 months

06. Key indicators:

Database 500+GB
Sphinx 900+GB
Docs storage ASW S3 2+TB
100,000+ documents updated daily

07. Technologies:

Microsoft .NET 4.0, ASP.NET MVC, MSSQL, Sphinx, Redis, Amazon Web Services