I want to write a series of blog posts talking about the iSEvolution project that we started last year.
Context
My name is Marco Rossi and I am the CTO of the company.
I work here since 2006, initially as a developer, after that as Solution Architect and in the last years as CTO.
In 2006 we were 10 people, many more today!
iSolutions has a sportsbook software platform, and one of our customers is the 2° web site in Nigeria’s top sites. Just to better understand the context: we have more traffic than Youtube and Facebook.
We got a lot of experience in a highly scalable platform with Microsoft .net and SQL Server.
The database for example contains billions of records and in peak times we have tables with more than 250.000 row per minute.
The product was born in 2008, with Microsoft .net 2.0 and 3.5, when Microsoft was a company that can give you all the tools to build an on-premises platform (Database, web server, caching system, monitoring system, etc).
Today Microsoft is very different:
- .net core is multiplatform
- Some products like app fabric are in “end of support”
- Azure and cloud are his priority
- Use open-source products like Redis and put some source code on Github
Vision 2019
So in 2019 as CTO of the company, I want to start a big evolution, with these 3 goals:
- Hot releases on our main products
- Having a structure that can help the growth of the company
- Introduce the latest technology and competence
To do that we need the help of someone with our philosophy and experience in a system with this traffic.
This person is Marco Cecconi. I saw him in a talk at the Community Days 2014 where he explains how Stack Overflow works.
It was one of my favorite talks because was very pragmatic, and with the same approach that we use in these 20 years.
We start the iSEvolution project with a small team and using a small product.
We work on these pillars:
After 4 months we have:
- A team that works with remote-first culture and in agile with scrum
- A product with hot releases and the possibility to do rollbacks in production
- A lot of refactors done (for example the build and release pipeline started from 30 minutes and now is 5 minute)
Another big step: we have done a talk at WPC 2019 to explain what we learn: it was my first talk and I’m very happy about that!
Vision 2020+
We have a very ambitious plan for 2020+: working on the main product with the same goals!
The guys already started with Agile and DevOps:
- 5 teams work every day with scrum and kanban
- we are releasing the product to our customers every week with automated pipelines
In the next posts, I will explain what we are doing in the details and what we are discovering month by month.
If you want to take part in this project and want to make the difference we are continuously hiring new people: Work With Us
Do you have any questions? Please contact me on