Soulmates is a leading British dating portal owned by Guardian News & Media Limited, which is visited by over 500 000 users a month. The character of the portal made high availability of the resources, auto-scalability, and complete security crucial for its proper functioning. Meanwhile, the application lost connection to the central code repository, thus limiting access to certain functions.

Due to lack of technical documentation, we started the task with an audit to learn in detail about the character of the application and all resources used to make it function. Then, we cleared numerous errors from the application and proceeded to design a private cloud computing (using AWS VPC) on the basis of the AWS cloud.

We achieved all the goals set for the project, both the interim and long-term ones. We re-established connection to the central code repository, which enabled re-establishing of full control over the portal and mobile application. We have sorted out the problem of frequent unavailability, which was frequently caused by overloaded servers. We also replaced the existing instance types that didn’t match the requirements of individual application layers (frontend, backend, cache, database).