- Partner: 3tierlogic
- Technologies Used: Angular, Typescript, Expressjs, OpenID Client, CLI, AWS, cypress, Docker, Bitbucket, Github Actions, Postman, Lighthouse, Play Framework, Akka, Akka-HTTP, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL, Abbyy, SendGrid, CodeShip, Jenkins, Scala.
- Geographic region: United States
Impact
- Current architecture provides access to all the APIs because users with this scope can access other APIs that the service may not require. And this can increase the attacking surface.
- The token provided under the existing scope contains more than necessary information; this may be risky as 3rd party users are also going to use tide as an identity provider.
About the Organization
Universal All Access (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, the home video distribution division of American film studio Universal Pictures) Rewards portal is a social platform that enables automated targeting/re-targeting of shoppers to extend customer relationships beyond the store aisle. It allows customers to engage socially with the brand which consequently influences their purchase habits and inadvertently encourages a similar kind of pattern among their connections to maintain a continuous channel of brand awareness through social media. The portal helps in maintaining a perpetual dialogue via contests and promotions, rewards and gamification, targeted couponing, and purchase validations with new customers while simultaneously establishing a rock-solid customer base.
The Challenges
To increase sales of the upcoming release of Universal Studios movies in the form of optical disk drives (4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, Full HD Blu-ray and DVD disks) and digital media among their existing huge customer base and to build it up further Home Entertainment division of Universal Pictures decided to go online with multiple sweepstakes, actions and other user engaging options to gamify purchase behavior. The challenge was to handle huge traffic spikes with each movie release and simultaneously capture meaningful geographical information of customers and their behavioral engagement with products and the brand. After that building, a data set using a homegrown analytics engine that acted as a holy grail for targeting and retargeting purposes.
Approach
High-Level Solution Details with the architecture diagram
Knoldus worked closely on the business requirements to identify key areas. After all criticalities were identified we started building the portal in Knolway (Knoldus software development methodology) following a two weeks sprint schedule. The user interface was built on Angular 8 with modern web libraries. We optimized the user interface to every possible extent to keep the user experience as smooth as possible. All services were built using Scala and Akka backing up all the complex logic and Elasticsearch was used for building the analytics engine. Architecturally, the entire portal was broken down into multiple logical services which were distributed as microservices each using Reactive Manifesto for development needs making all API communication asynchronous and non-blocking.
This figure shows all the attractive features of the UNIVERSAL PORTAL.
- Contest
- Survey
- Rewards
- Receipt Upload
- Earn Points
The below figure defines or describes all of the interaction/activities between the View(Components), Routing, Services, and Database with the additional functionality of ElasticSearch.
The team is dedicated, hard-working, and knowledgeable. Sincerely they provide a flexible solution design that enables secured communication between the various components saving a significant amount of time and money. This process has enabled us to become future-ready. They quickly understand our project and its technical challenges. Initially, there was a communication gap, but gradually the team worked on it and performed well.
— Zoe Yoxall, VP of operations and client services
Results
- Performance of the application
The final product was able to perform extremely well under high traffic spikes owing to the fact that all communication was done in a non-blocking fashion and scale-up was easy under the microservices architecture spectrum.
- Successfully implemented the non-blocking environment
The user interface was polished in such a way as to facilitate a non-blocking environment, essentially adding to the best user experience and allowing the generation of data holding critical value for branding needs.
- Easy to maintain and debug
All the services are now independent in nature. This allows the developers to maintain the project in a better way so that the faulty code is easily identified and debugged efficiently.
- Implemented Microservice Architecture Spectrum
To increase the user experience and enhance the quality of the animation used in the application.
- Implemented of ElasticSearch
To store all activities the user performs on the portal.
Eg:- If a user performs the Survey event the elastic search will store this activity for that particular user