Lightricks Tranforms Analytics with AWS and DoiT
Meet Lightricks
Lightricksย is known for creating intuitive, innovative mobile apps that regularly pick up awards from techโs biggest names. As a business that regularly releases pioneering and powerful products, Lightricks needed an analytics platform that was as agile and forward-looking as its own.
However, the companyโs legacy infrastructure had started to hold it back. Lightricksโ analytics was based on an in-house system that had suited the company at first but which no longer had enough flexibility to grow and adapt to the businessโs changing needs.
The challenge
The legacy system was hampering Lightricksโ ability to deliver the premium products it wanted. The data platform and analytics team now had to build custom databases to address complex queries from the business intelligence (BI) team. The platform had become expensive and resource-intensive to maintain. Its fragile codebase meant a change in one area could cause a failure elsewhere, while the systemโs design made it hard to identify and remediate the cause of any problems. โIt was standard legacy hell. The team had become a firefighting team rather than a development team,โ Adam Lev-Libfeld, head of data platform and analytics, says. โThere was a lot of pain in deploying new features and new pipelines.โ
The company decided to start exploring options for a new analytics infrastructure that would allow it to cut associated overheads and costs and enable Lightricks to focus more on creating new features and delivering great products. To help the company find the best solution for its needs, Lightricks turned to DoiT, a cloud consultancy that the app developer had worked with for some time.
The solution
A More Flexible Infrastructure
With Lightricksโ intake already using Amazon Web Services (AWS), includingย Amazon Kinesisย andย Amazon API Gateway, Lightricks and DoiT agreed that managed infrastructure services represented a quick win for the company. โGiven that we have the wonderful people from DoiT, and given that we have AWS platform with all its merits, what is our shortest path to value? The stars aligned,โ Lev-Libfeld says.
With DoiTโs assistance, Lightricks migrated to a platform built aroundย Amazon Kinesis Data Analyticsย andย Amazon DynamoDB, moving away from an architecture based on a series of monoliths to one thatโs centered on functional apps. Initial use cases were running on the new platform within a fortnight, followed a few weeks later by the majority. Within six months, not only were all legacy use cases on the new platform, they were joined by novel ones the company had developed in the meantime. โThe system is almost unrecognizably different, itโs doing everything itโs done before and then some,โ Lev-Libfeld says.
As the platform was developed and scaled up, Lightricks could benefit from DoiTโs experience to assess whether the system was hitting the deliverables and cost profiles that Lightricks was aiming for. โI look at DoiT as my safety net: they enable us to take bigger risks. I know that if we get stuck, someone knowledgeable is just a phone call away. We can have the assurance that weโre on the right track,โ Lev-Libfeld says.
Now, Lightricks has a more adaptable analytics system that allows the company to gain greater insight into how its customers use its software and use that information to develop products that better suit their needs, as well as optimize marketing campaigns to find new users or encourage existing users to try other products.
The result
Greater Insight at a Lower Cost
Through the migration, Lightricks has also achieved a reduction in costs of 90 percent compared to the equivalent feature set on the legacy platform. However, the company has become a far heavier user of analytics due to the expanded possibilities that the move to AWS offered.
The new platform has given the company a far greater level of insight into its data than was previously possible. While the legacy system was concentrated mostly on subscription data, its replacement takes in a far broader range of information. Lightricks now has a more granular view of user behavior without the need to collect any additional data, enabling the company to continue respecting its usersโ privacy. Latency has also come down dramatically, from one hour under the previous system to one second with the new, facilitating campaign optimization thatโs far more timely and targeted.
And, by having a more in-depth view of its user behavior, the company has been able to cut the time to market for new features: functionality that would typically have taken weeks to roll out can now be released in a matter of days. The work with DoiT and AWS has also enabled Lightricks to deliver excellent customer experience in other ways: creating a more fault-tolerant, highly available, and elastic platform that can accommodate peaks in customer demand without any interruption in service.