Product Thought Leadership

IntroductionA huge part of implementing any process orientated platform, is designing the conditional logic which gets applied at programatic junctions. This is responsible for directing and controlling the flow of logic in an application, reacting dynamically to user or API interactions. The most effective way to implement such requirements is to employ a "Rules Engine" that can apply that conditionality in a standard, reusable way.Business Rules as they apply to an evolving regulatory landscape, introduce a lot of diversity. In short, rules will change frequently and rapidly. Our goal was to make our implementation flexible and customizable, allowing the end-user to set rules without the need for any code modification or deployments, whilst we also wanted to ensure the performance met the SLA commitments we adhere to for clients. The rules engine in our SaaS application is designed to meet numerous functional use cases across the

IntroductionDeploying code to production automatically, often, and quickly is a principle we follow for our Fenergo SaaS CLM Platform. It brings with it many benefits, but also demands that a certain set of standards are followed to ensure it is done successfully.Continuously Deploying for Continuous ValueThe reason we deploy to our production environments often is to release value (via enhancements and new features) to our customers as soon as it becomes ready. The architectural decisions we made around how our platform is implemented, facilitate the release of independent autonomous enhancements to parts of the application instead of broad holistic full release. The larger the release, with a high volume of updates, require longer delivery cycle which package multiple changes. Clients get no value from a feature until it is first available, and then actively being used by t

The ChallengeHow can you tell when you've shipped production code? Some like dashboards, some check release notes, others still prefer to subscribe to alerts. All three groups look to me in confusion when I say you can do it with baked goods.HistoricallyBack in 2017, when I joined Fenergo, we were averaging three releases of our core product a year. Each new version was a struggle through merge conflicts and manual testing: time consuming events that added little in the way of client value. Success called for a celebration, and those celebrations often involved donuts. If all other markers of a new version passed a member of staff by we could depend on the presence of confectionary to alert them to the change.We were aware that infrequent releases are an antipattern. I've heard it said here that releases are like flossing: do it daily and it's pain free, do it every couple of months and it's unpleasant.We've

IntroductionSaaS Solution providers can live or die on the basis of availability. There is a massive shift of responsibility to the vendor, who must ensure that users along with their data are protected and safe (a massive and separate topic) but that the solution is available when the clients want to use it.This is no different to browsing Netflix only to be told "Sorry were having some technical difficulties at the moment" or "There are too many people watching that Movie right now". A SaaS product from a Fintech such as Fenergo might seem a million miles from a streaming service, but there is commonality in the target outcomes.If your platform suffers from availability issues, you will loose customers, breach SLAs and invalidate contracts. Your business will not last. The acceptable tolerance threshold for downtime is so low in our industry that meeting availability targets is only one aspect, vendors need to prove empirically that the str

IntroductionDynamoDB is the most popular NoSql database on AWS. It allows you to easily build highly performant applications, taking care of the good practices, such as: encryption, access control, high-availability, backups, etc.DynamoDB allows you to configure two types of capacity allocation: provisioned and on-demand, and it defines the capacity with read capacity units (RCU) and write capacity units (WCU). One RCU is one strongly consistent read or two eventually consistent reads for a data block of up to 4 KB. On the other hand, one WCU represents write request for a data block of up to 1 KB.When it comes to pricing, it is important to understand these two modes and pick the one that fits better for each case, so we can have tables that auto-scale without over-provisioning.In this post, we will see a real case, where picking the right mode helped to drastically reduce the cost of using DynamoDB.Provi

IntroductionA discussion which comes up often with our clients is that of Single vs Multi Cloud Strategy. Its an interesting topic to dig into and whilst benefits are evident for both approaches, it largely depends on the perspective you are coming from.Lets do the TL;DR - Fenergo as a SaaS Vendor align firmly with the Single Cloud approach, partnering with AWS works exceptionally well from our perspective based on the type of software we create and in this post I'll look at why that is the case and also why some IT Professionals might favour a Multi-Cloud strategy.A Cloud is a Cloud is a Cloud - Except when it isn’tThe terms "Cloud Adoption, Cloud Migration, Cloud Deployments, Cloud Provisioning" have so much crossover that they can almost be used interchangeably. Consider a software product or technical platform that previously lived on infrastructur

IntroductionEventStoreDB (ESDB) is a log stream database oriented to architectures based on event-sourcing. The data in EventStoreDB is stored into streams, and each stream contains a log of events. For this reason, ESDB is a very suitable candidate for working with event-sourcing architectures and it allows us to easily implement the CQRS pattern, where there are projections that transform the events produced by the commands into data that can be consumed by the queries.In EventStoreDB, there are three types of nodes: Leader, Follower and ReadOnly. The Leader node is the node where we write or read data and there can be only one Leader in the cluster. Follower nodes replicate the changes from the Leader node and they are not directly used for writing or reading data. However, if the Leader node is down, one Follower can be re-elected as the new Leader. For high-availability, it is recommended to have at least three nodes in three different availabi

IntroductionThe WebSocket API is an advanced technology that makes it possible to open a two-way interactive communication session between the user’s browser and a server. With this API, you can send messages to a server and receive event-driven responses without having to poll the server for a reply.We normally use WebSockets when we want to get live updates of a particular object without having to constantly poll for new updates. In this scenario, WebSockets can be helpful as they reduce the required number of API calls and in turn the cost of our infrastructure, and if the number of request is very high, the API might apply throttling.In this article, we will review how we could use WebSockets for EverntSourcing+CQRS. You can follow the same approach for other architectures where you need to notify the clients when changes happen in a certain dataset.ArchitectureIn Fenergo we are using EventSourcing and CQ

Over the past year as a SaaS developer at Fenergo, I've been focused on the challenge of hosting a third-party SDK inside our AWS ecosystem. My goal was to ensure the service could run in a way that scales reliably, integrates cleanly with our existing infrastructure.To achieve this, I used Pulumi to streamline Infrastructure as Code, which made it easier to model, manage, and iterate on cloud resources as the project evolved. Wherever possible, I leveraged existing infrastructure components - such as our VPC, subnets, and security groups - instead of duplicating effort. For new requirements, I identified and provisioned the most appropriate AWS services that fit our needs, balancing performance, cost efficiency, and maintainability.A key part of the solution was building and automating CI/CD pipelines, which allowed us to provision infrastructure, deploy updates, and run validations in a consistent and repeatable way. This gave the team confidence to roll out changes

"Pressure is a privilege" - Billie Jean KingI've been thinking about this quote a lot lately. Not because I read it in a leadership book, but because it surfaces in the back of my head as I take part in every standup, every refinement session, every conversation about what we're building next.The ground is shifting beneath us. Weekly. Sometimes daily.And here's what I've learned after leading teams through three years of the AI revolution at Fenergo: this pressure isn't something to manage away - it's the most valuable thing we have.The Day Everything Changed (Again)I remember the exact moment in early 2023 when one of our senior engineers put forward a What Did Not Go