Combating climate change by helping a B Corp plant millions of trees
Building velocity, scale and digital capability
Treedom is an accredited B Corp which grows trees to combat climate change. 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, including farmers from across 17 countries.
Improving user experience and optimising internal processes
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 exponential growth, which in turn led to new challenges.
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.
Furthermore, the system couldn't be deployed at the frequency Treedom needed it to be, and the website loading speed was too long.
Developing an impactful technical strategy
Treedom chose Nearform as its partner to assist in developing its technical strategy. 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.
“The site used to have some hundreds of people on it at the same time. In a year, it went to thousands. So, in that period of time, we had to enhance everything. When I called Nearform, first of all, we went through an architectural workshop. It was three days of analysis that was done. We were able, together, to define a target architecture. And through the architectural workshop, we got a to-do list.” Valerio Manzo — Head of Information Technology at Treedom
Enhancing performance
To improve performance, HTML rendering was removed from Treedom’s existing monolith, enabling the mission-critical API to keep functioning under load. We adopted a Backend for Frontend (BFF) approach using Node.js and Fastify to increase throughput (the number of units of information a system can process), reduce latency, and reduce the website loading speed. In addition, a caching strategy using AWS CloudFront was implemented to further enhance performance.
Our impact
Increasing throughput by 400%
By adopting a Backend for Frontend (BFF) approach using Node.js and Fastify, throughput has increased by four times and latency reduced to 1/10th.
Reducing loading speed by 79%
Treedom’s website now performs well even during spikes in traffic, and features deployment increased as well. The homepage loading speed was reduced from eight seconds to 1.7 seconds, while the average site speed was cut from 20+ seconds to five seconds.
Boosting deployment frequency
Previously, the Treedom team was deploying once a week. Now, they deploy updates multiple times a day.
Improving CI/CD and automating testing
To accelerate the development process, Nearform assisted Treedom in improving its CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment) pipeline and implemented automated testing across multiple services.
“Before the Nearform team joined us, the team was able to deliver once a week. We're still growing, but we're talking about six, seven, eight, ten deploys per day in a production environment.”
Our capabilities
ENGINEERING
Platform modernisation
Improving the CI/CD pipeline
Implementing automated testing
Backend for Frontend (BFF)
Cloud engineering
STRATEGY
Architectural workshop
Developing a robust technical strategy
Insight, imagination and expertly engineered solutions to accelerate and sustain progress.
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