About Splio
Splio is a SaaS marketing platform for retail and e-commerce brands that enables customers to maximize value at each interaction with their customers. Their product integrates CDP and Marketing Automation, offering essential CRM features (loyalty, Mobile Wallets), into a single platform powered by AI.
Splio's Campaign Manager is a key feature that enables brand marketers to activate customer data and activity to send personalized communications at the right moment across different channels to drive customer engagement and sales.
It offers a simple drag and drop interface that enables marketers to easily create and manage custom campaigns (aka workflows) that:
Brands can monitor and measure the overall performance of campaigns and individual customers across multiple channels.
Previously, the Campaign Manager was built on aging infrastructure and could not support features and functionality that customers needed - especially real time/event based use cases.
A few specific problems:
Splio needed to build a new campaign management system that would enable them to:
The Splio team evaluated building out their custom backend tooling to support the campaign manager but determined that would take 12-18 months and would give them neither flexibility to iterate nor the reliability at scale that they required. [link to to other article]
An orchestration framework to save their team time and deliver reliability “Day 1”.
While building custom tooling would enable them to build everything from scratch, the first version would lack all of the backend tooling that provides visibility and handles all of the edge cases. And, as soon as they began making updates or adding more features, they would quickly accumulate tech debt and end up back where they started spending most of their time on maintenance and fixing code.
With an orchestration framework - like Infinitic, their team could focus on building the core code/features that they needed while relying on Infinitic for built-in error management and observability and automating the configuration and management of event-streaming, queuing and state management.
Infinitic allowed us to move to an event-driven system without building out and maintaining a data streaming infrastructure.”
Our campaigns had to interact with a lot of services that were sometimes finicky or had rate limits. With Infinitic we could easily configure how we interacted with those services and handled any outages or downtime. They would have had to build themselves.
Simplified architecture for complex use cases:
“An event-driven architecture with a queuing system”.
They also loved the architecture of Infinitic which simplified their code, allowing them to separate the task or activity in the worker from the workflow/orchestration code with the state management happening inside Infintiic. This enabled anyone on the team to easily understand and update each portion of the code and avoid ‘spaghetti’ code mixing activity logic with event handling or error management.
Open Source Framework built on Apache Pulsar:
As Infinitic is an open source orchestration framework built on top of Apache Pulsar, they felt confident in Apache Pulsar as a proven reliable and scalable engine that is supported by the community. They were also already familiar with Apache Kafka, a similar data-streaming technology.
Between its architecture and reliance on familiar data-streaming technology, they felt that it offered a manageable learning curve for their team compared to other frameworks and confidence in its ability to deliver performance at scale.
Splio shipped the first version of the campaign manager to their customers after 6 months of development. They started with real-time ‘low latency’ campaigns to customers and then quickly started adding new features - over 20 features in a matter of months which would have taken years without Infinitic and would not have worked as well.
“Day 1”: When they launched the first version, everything worked as expected - which is unusual for a brand new application which would normally require months of internal testing and bug fixing and a long beta period. They were quickly running millions of workflows per day without any issues. The team was easily able to add features and updates rapidly - just by updating and versioning the workflow code.
“Without Infinitic it would have taken at least 6 more months to complete and we would not have had the same level of features. Also, we would have had a lot of headaches”
Three years later (2024), they have run over 3 billion workflows with minimal incidents. Their team has stayed small and lean while scaling both volume and features, since Infinitic handles the overhead of managing the backend tooling.
They can now build an end to end ‘new feature’ in a 2-week development cycle instead of taking a few months.
“Build features ‘super fast’ without issue”
With Infinitic, Splio’s team can build and deploy a new feature into production in 2 weeks instead of a few months.
“We have built way more features using Infinitic than we could have on our own. In the last few months we’ve built over 20 new features. Without infinitic, we probably would have only been able to build a few”
Minimal backend code: Due to the minimal amount of backend code required for new functionality, they spend the bulk of the two weeks on the front end UI (!) and only have to write new tasks or activities and make updates to the logic in the workflow code on the backend.
Limited Testing Required: Once the updates are made, they are able to easily test the new workflow version by deploying it to staging and testing the new activities.
No risk of disruption to existing campaigns: When updates are made, they are able to release a new version of existing workflows without impacting any campaigns that are currently running - since some of the campaigns span weeks or months. This ensures that any updates to the workflow do not impact existing customers
One example is a recent feature they added to cap the amount of emails that a brand sends to a single customer across all campaigns in a specified period of time.
While Infinitic has delivered a lot of advantages for Splio’s customers, the engineering team has been happy with the impact it has had on their day to day operations.
Simplicity of code: With Infinitic automating and managing all of the boilerplate ‘code’, there is less code & tech debt for the team to maintain which makes their codebase smaller and more focused. Infinitic’s architecture creates a separation of ‘tasks’ within the codebase and all of the plumbing and infrastructure management.
“Our team loves Infinitic because the code is cleaner and more focused on product and business logic while all of the ‘plumbing’ for error handling and sending/receiving events is separate (and templated in Infinitic) so the team doesn’t have to manage it - they can just focus on the product/business logic”
New features ‘Just Work’: Infinitic reduces the burden of testing and managing all of the tooling when building a new feature. This allows the team to focus on the ‘fun part’ of how the product should work and iterate rapidly on core functionality. Also, since they can easily deploy new workflow versions without ‘breaking’ anything for ongoing campaigns and customers they can ship updates faster without headaches.
