Understanding and continually improving the user experience is critical to the success of web applications, especially those that are business-driven.There exist a multitude of tools to monitor user activities on a website, which then provide metrics to help developers and company leadership understand where their users experience pain-points.However, all tools suffer from their own limitations and ultimately it is important for companies to have as much control (as possible) over all data collected by third-party tools, and be able to make decisions related to its storage, retention, processing, etc., in an agile manner.At Dottid, we use a third-party tool to understand and enhance the user experience on our web application, recently however, we ran into a problem regarding failed logins that required us to architect a solution ourselves, since the tool cannot address this issue for us.The solution leverages log collection and big data analytics and its architecture has paved the way for us to build more actionable insights than if we were using the tool as-is.We transparently share our experiences, and the details of our solution and rationale, with the goal of benefiting others, and promoting further industry-academic collaboration, in this space.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are widely considered to be best practices in software development. Studies have shown however, that adopting these practices can be challenging and there are many barriers that engineers may face, such as – overly long build times, lack of support for desired workflows, issues with configuration, etc. At Varidesk, we recently began shifting our primary web application (from a monolithic) to a micro-services-based architecture and also adapted our software development practices to aim for more effective CI/CD. In doing so, we also ran into some of the same afore-mentioned barriers. In this paper we focus on two specific challenges that we faced – long wait times for builds/releases to be queued and completed, and the lack of support for tooling, especially from a cross-cloud perspective. We then present the solutions that we came up with, which involved re-thinking DevOps as it applied to us, and re-building our own CI/CD pipelines based on DevOps-supporting approaches such as containerization, infrastructure-as-code, and orchestration. Our re-designed pipelines have led us to see speed increases, in terms of total build/release time, in the range of 330x-1110x and have enabled us to seamlessly move from a single-cloud to a multi- cloud environment, with no architectural changes to any apps.