Wish Farms Case Study

SUMMARY

Type of Product

Inventory Management System

Business Vertical

Agriculture

Service

Full-service Development Team—Solutions Architect, Product Manager, Full-stack Developers, Technical Lead, DevOps Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer

Project Duration

December 2021 - Ongoing

Tech Used

AWS + Lambda + API Gateway + ReactJS + NodeJS

Description

Application used for inventory management and tracking.

Results

Migration of legacy backend from a monolith on Digital Ocean VMs to a serverless micro-services based backend on AWS Lambda and API Gateway. In addition to frontend application upgrades and new feature development for improved usability.

THE CHALLENGE

When Wish Farms contacted us, they had an accuracy issue with their inventory management software. In addition, intermittent data loss was occurring when employees were in the field, resulting in inaccurate data entry and financial loss to the company.

We knew they needed a cloud-native solution that could scale as the company added more locations and pickers, accurately scanning inventory and tracking it through each stage of the workflow.

We wanted to establish a collaborative model with the client, using our robust, agile development process to define a core list of features and break the project into phases based on the business value of each feature set.

We needed to define a solution that would enhance and support the existing web and mobile applications while increasing reliability and performance.

The Problem

Wish Farms needed a new development team to maintain and upgrade their applications and infrastructure. Their system was suffering from scalability and reliability issues causing inconsistent data loss within their inventory management system. In addition, the platform was hosted on-prem and through a monolith on Digital Ocean, requiring an updated architecture.

The Solution

Our DevOps and Architecture team assessed the system’s faults and developed a migration strategy that would migrate everything on AWS; thus, providing a more reliable and secure platform that would be built to scale. At the same time, we performed frontend application updates to increase functionality and usability, while also solving the data loss issues plaguing the system.

WHAT WE BUILT

We migrated the legacy backend of the Wish Farms berry tracking app from a monolith on Digital Ocean VMs to a serverless microservice backend on AWS, using Lambda and an API Gateway. We also migrated their CaseLink Pro ETL process from on-prem Docker containers to Lambda containers driven by EventBridge.

In addition, we added more comprehensive logging to ensure the data was correctly transferred from the mobile application to the inventory database, this gave admins a more comprehensive snapshot into the accuracy of the pickers and the clamshells they were scanning in.

API endpoints were updated in the applications to match migration changes. Also, frontend upgrades were developed on the mobile and web applications adding additional features to the barcode scanning and printing workflow.

Before release, the applications and Lambdas were load tested to ensure they could meet peak demand requirements in the field.