MashrMail

The client

MashrMail is a game-changing email builder, enabling enterprise teams to create impactful emails easily, and efficiently with the ability to distribute in multiple languages. It is an intuitive platform that seamlessly integrates with popular marketing and workflow tools.

The challenge

MashrMail were poised to grow their customer base, and planned to move to a true SaaS model in the future; however, they knew their tech stack would need upgrading and their existing infrastructure presented a few roadblocks too:

Adding new customers to the MashrMail platform was a completely manual process, requiring the development team to use cPanel to create new databases and then deploy each new customer instance. The management of this was becoming time-consuming and inefficient for their team as their customer base increased.

As an email creation platform, MashrMail stored sensitive data on their servers. Therefore, prioritising Security on their infrastructure was critical. Their tech stack had potential vulnerabilities which needed to be addressed.

MashrMail’s hosting provider was ‘keeping the lights on’ but couldn’t optimise their architecture for their future requirements. MashrMail needed an infrastructure solution that was fully scalable and had automation capabilities to take the pressure off their development team.

The solution

After searching for a Managed Hosting partner with migration and DevOps expertise, MashrMail got in touch with Just After Midnight. 

Migration

The first step of migration is Discovery. Our Solutions Architect deep-dived MashrMail’s legacy architecture and put together a clear assessment of their current infrastructure setup, the application, new customer deployment process, and supporting tools and dependencies. We also had a good idea of MashrMail’s pain points, and their goals for the platform. 

This helped inform the next step: MashrMail’s new infrastructure design in AWS. Scalability and Security were priority, our strategy was to build the infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-a-Code for ease of scalability and future proofing, and to implement AWS’s best practice security tools for wrap-around protection. 

We walked the client through their new proposed architecture in AWS and our solution for their new customer deployment process, making sure the product owner and development team were comfortable adapting to utilising GitHub Automated Workflows for new customer creation. Deploying new customers this way would minimise manual intervention, and reduce any risk of errors and time spent on manual work. 

Our third step of the migration process was to assess the client’s application in readiness for moving to AWS. We recommended the development team upgrade to the latest versions of MySQL and PHP to ensure MashrMail were on supported versions with the longest support-cycle available. 

Finally, we began to build MashrMail’s new staging and production environments & commenced the migration. The infrastructure needed to be located in Europe to meet end customers’ GDPR requirements. We were able to re-deploy staging and production environments efficiently in Europe with minimal impact to the project timeline. The team achieved the goal of a simple, safe and effective migration onto AWS and are now comfortable in the hands of the Just After Midnight famous 24×7 managed services.

The results:

• Automated processes in GitHub streamline new customer onboarding, freeing up valuable resources, allowing the MashrMail team to focus on developing new platform features. 
• The Application stack has been brought up to date to the latest versioning by the development team. JAM has added AWS WAF, Guard Duty and Security Hub as the wrap-around tools protecting the application and infrastructure 24×7 with JAM’s ‘eyes-on’ monitoring. 
• The future-state architecture paves the way for global expansion and regional compliance.
• The platform is now equipped to handle growth effortlessly.