Made by Fire (MbF) is a digital product design Agency with Soul. It is not just a UX/UI design agency and not just a tech agency, it creates digital products for its ambitious clients. It adds value beyond features and specifications. It sells a culture of SPEED. With a presence in London, Edinburgh, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai with an experienced team of 100 strategists, product designers, technology architects, experience designers, creative technologists and engagement specialists help startups and enterprises to shape, design, build and market innovative digital products.
Conceptually, the MbF reference architecture is modular, multi-tiered and loosely coupled. The browser-centric ReactJS or React Native UI that delivers high-performance functional experiences is supported by a micro-services API architecture. API’s are built using Spring Boot/Java or NodeJS and exposed as REST endpoints to be consumed by the UI layer. The crown jewel, aka data, is held either in Mongo DB or MySQL.
Using the IAAC (Infrastructure As A Code) philosophy, team MbF runs the scripts on the Google integrated Kubernetes engine. This open-source platform enables them to automate the provisioning of the required Development, Test and Production environments. Google’s container engine that seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes makes it easier to create Kubernetes clusters. The containerised architecture allows their engineering teams to move swiftly, deploy software efficiently, and operate at an unprecedented scale. They take advantage of the Google containers that provide a Container Registry to store project-specific images. Creating pods for each architecture tier, and connecting the pods to each other, is all scripted. The SDK support for both Google Cloud and Kubernetes is instrumental in automating our deployments.
The GCP (Google Cloud Platform) augurs well for team MbF, in terms of supporting all their CI/CD needs; they work using a 2-week Agile Sprint model. This means that after having created the first environment, there is a need for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) of features at the end of every sprint. Hence, automation becomes the spindle of their delivery process. Packaging, checking code quality, automating testing and deploying the solutions into target environments, form part of a typical DevOps pipeline at MbF.
Having moved MVP to production, MbF continues to evolve the product by doing feature-based development. This approach enables team MbF to deliver value to their clients continuously. Features are incrementally developed, tested and promoted to production. The rolling upgrade feature for container deployments helps them achieve frequent releases of features, and manage the risk to the Live services.
Once in production, team MbF utilise GCP’s out-of-the-box integration, for open source monitoring and logging tools are deployed in a cluster. This approach again helps their Site Reliability engineering team to ensure that their client’s digital platform is always looked after. For them, Site Reliability Engineering is an important space where all the environments are monitored, designed to be resilient and auto-scaled as per the demand. Alerts and notifications enable them to be on top of any infrastructure issues.
The ready-to-use service discovery using intracluster DNS makes network setup and routing so much easier. The auto-scaling feature for pods enables MbF to provision the right level of infrastructure for the clients and ensures a cost-effective infrastructure setup, where they only pay what they use. At the same time, they can survive a peak in demand, without having to provision a large number of servers in anticipation of high demand. Google’s per-minute billing, enables MbF to provide clients with great production values at speed, within very cost-effective parameters.
Google’s strong value proposition, which lends momentum to any development initiative, puts forth some great reasons to consider the Google Cloud Platform for your next development.
What has worked for MbF
- Serverless, fully managed computing, that allows for growing their client’s products from MVP to production to planet-scale, without thinking about capacity, reliability or performance.
- The flexibility of the cloud platform offers a suite of services that can be tuned to business-specific needs, without much ado.
- The Google Cloud SDK makes available a brilliant set of tools and libraries, which facilitate the onerous task of creating resources and managing them in Cloud environments.
- Lastly, team MbF said, the pay-as-you-go model, enables developments to be cost-effective, without cutting corners on value.
Meet the PathMaker
Sachin Deshpande is CTO at Made by Fire – a global product design Agency with Soul. He operates out of London, overseeing a global tech team of over hundred technology specialists. “Our Concept to launch in 60 days proposition, therefore, is no click bait attempt. At Made by Fire (MbF), we have forged this into a reality, thanks to Google and their grand suite of Cloud offerings,” says Sachin about their offerings.