HelloFresh: Navigating the rough seas of environment scaling with Aho

In the past couple of years, our engineering team at HelloFresh has experienced a huge growth spurt. Within 2 years our team grew from 35 engineers to well over 150. One of the biggest challenges we faced was how to enable over 20 teams to test their code independently to other teams in a stable environment.

HelloTech Team Growth

I’m going to tell you about how we solved scaling our staging and local environments using phoenix environments.

The Problem

When we were smaller we had only 2 environments, what we called stagingand production. This setup was great for simple applications and small teams. Once we moved to a microservice architecture with 90+ services it quickly became apparent that it was not a scalable solution.

With more teams blocking staging for their testing, the environment quickly became unusable. The solution seemed simple, create an environment for each team called team staging.

Team Staging: Not the solution

We hoped that by creating a staging environment (which is a subset of all services from the main staging) for each team, it would enable them to test whatever they wanted in isolation. Or so we thought; in reality, it was much more complicated than that.

The Continue reading

Scaling @ HelloFresh: API Gateway

HelloFresh keeps growing every single day: our product is always improving, new ideas are popping up from everywhere, our supply chain is being completely automated. All of this is simply amazing us, but of course this constant growth brings many technical challenges.

Today I’d like to take you on a small journey that we went through to accomplish a big migration in our infrastructure that would allow us to move forward in a faster, more dynamic, and more secure way.

The Challenge

We’ve recently built an API Gateway, and now we had the complex challenge of moving our main (monolithic) API behind it — ideally without downtime. This would enable us to create more microservices and easily hook them into our infrastructure without much effort.

The Architecture