An effort that took 2 years finally completed yesterday when we updated the Kerika app.

This massive project involved rewriting everything on the back-end of Kerika in order to modernize the architecture and set up us for a more rapid development of end-user functionality, as well as making it easier to release new versions in the future using Docker container.

Our old backend was not well designed: everything ran as a single monolithic server. Over the years we moved slowly away from that, by building new features as microservices, and while that helped a little, it wasn’t enough.

We had reached a point where it was taking exponentially more time to build new features, and we were facing operational risk as well because the old backend was poorly understood and document.

A complete rewrite was necessary, and we bit the bullet on that a couple of years ago. There was significant cost and complexity but our great team powered through all the challenges, particularly when it came to transitioning our main database away from MySQL (hosted as RDS, by Amazon) to a NoSQL model using Google’s Firestore service.

Now that we are done we can start delivering more functionality, starting with support for non-English languages.

Stay tuned for our first non-English language, which will be Hindi, to be offered in a couple of weeks.