Treedom
The Story
Its projects are for the most part located in developing countries where the company focuses with its local communities on realising economic and social benefits such as generating oxygen, providing food, as well as offering a refuge for wildlife. Every tree that Treedom sells is geolocated and photographed so that buyers receive regular updates about the project their tree grows in.
A journey towards the future
Treedom was founded in Italy in 2010 and has since planted more than three million trees with the support of more than 120,000 project participants such as farmers across 17 countries. In 2020, Treedom secured a €10 million investment in series B funding and support from former Formula 1 world champion and investor Nico Rosberg, enabling the company to accelerate its tree planting efforts. This set off an exponential growth, which in turn led to new challenges.
Accelerating innovation
One key question was how to enable Treedom to reimagine and rapidly re-engineer its existing digital platform. The business wanted to provide a better user experience for its customers, reduce the number of tickets, and optimise processes internally.
Building capability in:
Treedom chose NearForm as a provider to assist in developing its technical strategy for the next 12 months. This included positioning developers in-house to increase the business’ digital capabilities as well as assist Treedom with re-engineering its processes to better cope with high traffic volumes.
Deliverables
To improve performance, HTML rendering was removed from Treedom’s existing monolith, enabling the mission-critical API to keep functioning under load.
Adopting a Backend for Frontend (BFF) approach using Node.js and Fastify to increase throughput, reduce latency, and reduce the website loading speed.
In addition, a caching strategy using AWS CloudFront was implemented to further enhance performance.
The Results
To accelerate the development process, Nearform assisted Treedom in improving its CI/CD pipeline and implemented automated testing across multiple services.
One year ago, the Treedom team was deploying at midnight once every two weeks at most. Now, they deploy updates multiple times a day.
Adopting a Backend for Frontend (BFF) approach using Node.js and Fastify, throughput has increased by four times and latency reduced to 1/10th.
Treedom’s website now performs well even during spikes in traffic, and features deployment increased as well. Most notably, the website loading speed was reduced from eight seconds to 1.7 seconds.
Treedom’s development team is now scaling, paving the way for innovation while making a difference to the environment and community.
Looking to the future, Treedom is looking to further optimise performance and enable greater velocity across multiple teams, leveraging GraphQL Federation and microservices.
Find out more at treedom.net