The Tech Stack Behind TEA

At The Convergency Hub (TCH) we're continuously pushing on a variety of projects and one of those we recently launched was The Earnings Assistant (TEA). TEA has quickly found it's much-needed space in the South African market with some reliable mathematical application to solve a very real-world problem for professionals in the earnings space. You can watch a demonstration of the app to see what it does but this article looks more specifically at the technology behind the scenes. Under the hood, as it were. In doing so, I will highlight the platform used while addressing some FAQ surrounding the development approach.

Also, this project is a fantastic example of a straightforward full-stack development effort. If any programmer is looking for direction in this space, this is one of the many approaches available that you could use. We have data storage, encapsulated backend logic (or IP), some front end logic to co-ordinate with the front end client experience, a variety of languages to shoot with across the stack, and of course, the DevOps and client support side.

In a nutshell, TEA is primarily a modern, Microsoft-oriented, C#, cloud-based, web application. More specifically, it's a .NET 4.7 MVC 6 app with EntityFramework and WebAPI, hosted with Microsoft Azure in the South Africa North datacenter. Backing the application is an Azure SQL server. The front end is a styled Bootstrap 4 theme with jQuery and a lot of custom javascript using, mostly, mustache.js templates. Straightforward.

There's a lot of shelf life in choosing a simple (but no simpler) architecture for any given project. One important consideration often overlooked is the ecosystem of the organisation within its market as well as the greater technical skillset available beyond your organisation.

A highly distributed application based on a microservices approach is almost at the opposite end of this installation. As "nice" as that approach might sound, every moving part introduced into an architecture requires constant configuration, integration, monitoring, and maintenance. More services, more assets, more configuration, more secrets. And sometimes, more subscriptions mean more credit card charges and hence a shift onto the finance department to consolidate billing. The architecture you choose must trade-off between the technical soundness of the application and the human environment supporting it.

The beauty of the straightforward approach in TEA is that it leverages off the security and best practices of the Microsoft ASP.Net ecosystem that has been tried and trusted over years of collective development experience and expertise. This also ensures that the shelf life of the application is protected, along with the development investment and users' data.

The source code itself is securely hosted with Visual Studio online (using Git) with continuous integration (CI) to the hosted Azure web application. Insofar as source code detail is concerned, like most projects, much is tied to the intellectual property developed over time and beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, the development effort behind the code involved a lot of intricate mathematics from a team of actuaries and software developers with a special mathematics bent and a lot of coffee. Lest we forget the marketing, program, finance, and project managers whom all played their part in making sure the project launched to serve its customer base in the right way from day one.

One of the more demanding elements in this collective effort was the production of the testbed and the beloved unit tests which stretched the inputs, both strategically and logically to ensure the main calculations were correct to the 14th decimal place. There's a special kind of OCD and attention to detail required to get that right ;)

Once up and running and hosted securely with Azure, the DevOps side of the application has also been largely automated using, inter-alia, Azure Functions and integrated into our Microsoft Teams environment, using WebHooks, with automated reporting, live statistics (beyond regular web analytics) and online support during business hours.

And all this is just the beginning. As the technology landscape continues to mature within the expanding .NET world, TEA is poised to migrate with those shifts and stay relevant with a technology stack that has been trusted to deliver enterprise-grade applications. As we prepare ourselves to scale, we also rely on the on-demand scaling that is available with Azure across the application, data, and API layers which all help to stay focused on the next generation of features.

But for now, we'll continue to grow the application and respond to users' needs with new releases. In fact, there was just another release this last week at the time of writing. This also means there's just enough time for a small coffee celebration and then onwards and upwards for more brainstorming.