How Symv developed a cloud workflow automation platform and helped them get acquired by global, data-centric software company

Organizations moving to and operating in the cloud need to be able to operate at speed and automate their infrastructures quickly. Applications integrate with the services and workflows across their cloud environments. And as the number of services and workflows increase, developing and maintaining these integrations and automation quickly becomes expensive, complex and time-consuming, requiring site reliability engineering (SRE) resources. Our customer aims to address these challenges with its innovative low-code technology for cloud automation, enabling DevOps and SREs to scale, optimize and maintain their cloud operations at a fraction of the cost. They aimed to simplify infrastructural operations.

The customer built a suite of technologies designed to automate every part of a cloud workflow to provide data services and cloud resource management. Although their vision was clear, the platform had many challenges, including inconsistent UI, a lack of scalability and non-production-ready code. The loading time of the platform was relatively high, and the users were experiencing frequent crashes. In addition to that, there was also no multi-tenancy at the organisation or team level. The customer needed a technology partner who could support them in building a user-friendly workflow builder/editor in order to provide an end-to-end automation solution.

We set up a dedicated team 12 - 6 Frontend Engineers who work on the React codebase (1 Lead, 3 Senior and 2 Junior Developer), 3 Senior Backend Engineers working on Python and 3 QA Automation Engineers (1 Lead and 2 Senior Engineers). The engineers played an instrumental role in creating an effective go-to-market strategy.

• The team started by organising the current code base, eliminating redundant code and putting best coding practices for building and refactoring reusable components.
• We cleaned the code and used the drag-and-drop feature to make it easy to duplicate. These templates eventually acted as pre-built workflows to trigger, integrate, and use third-party tools.
• The next step was implementing the workflow builder, which required considerable research to ensure a stable chart library, keeping the existing code compatibility in mind.

• The team added scheduling the workflows feature. We defined workflows which could be repeated over and over with little or no manual intervention and could be set to run on a fixed schedule. This helped reduce operational costs, errors and the amount of hands-on effort needed to manage operations.
• We improved the functionality for workflows by making everything dynamic, more robust and back-end driven.

The developed product had significantly better workflow automation at both the front and back ends. Automated workflows allowed them to access pre-built workflows, eventually saving them time, cost and improved scalability.

The team helped the customer revamp the entire frontend framework from scratch (with better workflow automation), build an all-new incident management tool, and support them in achieving integrations with third-party applications like Datadog, Twilio, etc.