Social Media

Cronycle

A platform for creating and configuring search channels for articles on the Internet, allowing you to share them with your team

Technologies

Ruby, Swift, Kubernetes, Node.js

Industry

Social Media

Engagement Model

Dedicated Team

Platform

iOS, Android, Web

Team

11 members

Timeline

1 year

About the project

The application allows you to create a board with your favorite articles and share them with the team. The team can comment and highlight relevant information on these boards without leaving the platform. Cronycle spares you from copying and pasting links between different apps or platforms. Altogether, it ensures a smooth work process without extra steps being done.

Among other solutions, the following services are available in the project:

Challenges to overcome

Before we started working on the project, the Cronycle platform comprised several Heroku-based applications to parse different sorts of content from the websites that have no API.

The system data was stored on Amazon s3 while Amazon RDS hosted the database. From a financial standpoint, using these third-party cloud platforms was rather expensive, e.g. the US-based retail giant charged $10k per month.

Speaking of costs, Embedly, another third-party platform used by Cronycle to aggregate content, also charged a few cents for each URL it was processing. And since more and more people started using Cronycle, the number of URLs often jumped over hundreds of thousands!

Our work

For dedicated server hosting, the Cronycle team suggested using Hetzner. The first thing we moved was the database. Next, we reindexed Elasticsearch using the resources of the application. As soon as reindexing was finished, the brand new Elasticsearch was good to go.

When moving the database, we came across some problems related to Amazon RDS, which the Bucardo replication system helped us solve. After a lengthy data migration procedure, we decided to separate applications and services so that problems with one would not cause problems with the entire application.

After conducting in-depth research on the theme of parsing, we launched not only new applications but also introduced new system functions and settings, for example, a feature that allows you to display the author’s name on a website page.

Business results

We built a large, complex, and independent content-aggregation platform with a micro-service architecture that helps all kinds of users find and organize relevant content with just a little effort.