These API endpoints are working on new Rails APP which are linked with existing IDT database as informed earlier. We are planning to create a layered service object which will populate the data from IDoneThis database to a different database on Mongo which will help in processing faster report queries.
With that said, I am still waiting on some of the KPIs or the reports which you would like to see on separate dashboard or on API endpoints for the consumers to add into their system. If you can please let me know, we can plan the APIs and perhaps focus on these end points on priority basis.
We further have tried and reduced some of the infrastructure and I guess this is the best we can do at the moment. This also means, we have removed Staging server and database, reduced the database types, emptied many S3 buckets which were being used for logs, removed AMI snapshots, removed WAF rules, reduced the time for backup storage of RDS.
I did a careful calculation, the current infrastructure now should cost about $650 per month and I don't think we see any possibility to go below this. We are still monitoring the performance of the application and will keep a watch.
For the next 11 days, we'll see the daily billing and average out the expected monthly cost from December onwards.
On a separate note, we are losing customers on IDoneThis way too fast and I don't think any new trials are turning to subscriptions. Most of the users are finding the site to be not useful anymore and are migrating to other solutions.
If you are looking for a long term solution to this, I think you need to re-look at the entire product and bring in some value additions. Maintenance of this existing code is way too complicated to change and the features are kind of obsolete against the price they are paying. If re-build or serious upgrade is not in question, then in that case, in my personal opinion (which may be a rubbish thought also), you should really need to think what you need to do next for this as we may reach way too low in coming days.
We did not invest only in infrastructure. It was a small portion which went into automation of infrastructure and reducing environment cost which was about $3200 prior to we worked on it. Right now it is about $1100 and after today's operations, is about to go down to $650.
I guess bringing cost to less than 1/4 itself is a good achievement.
As far as development is concerned, we did implement multiple changes as required, cleaned up database, added additional functions and also changed Cloudinary file storage of Heroku to new account with no cost implications of migration.
We also worked on integration of Google Task which was developed partially (about 80% complete) and left in the middle when the development was stopped. We need to go through Google Security assessment for Sensitive scope permission and that is where it is pending right now because Google has changed it's assessment guidelines.
I just thought of informing you about the application status as I believed it was important. Rest you will definitely decide on what ever is best for your asset.
Heroku has gone nuts. We are also facing the problem with our internal Heroku account also where we are unable to pay our bills and they are adamant on not reinstating our account.
In regards to IDoneThis, no, we do not have any immediate issue with it except that we had some profile pictures of our users uploaded on Cloudinary which was linked to IDoneThis.
Since Cloudinary access is closed, users will not see the profile pictures. Moreover, due to missing cloudinary setup, our Sign up with Google is failing and also if we go to Update our profile, the page crashes.
As it looks like we won't be able to re-activate our Heroku account, I am asking the development team to create a new independent Cloudinary account and use it's API key.
For now, Cloudinary is the only option in the old code base, unless we don't migrate the entire application to the new platform. However, we should be good with Free Plan for a long time period. I would assume over 6 to 10 months. So, for now it should be fine with free account.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other ideas/questions. Integrating S3 doesn't seem to be an option as of now until we don't upgrade the entire application to Rails 5.2 minimum.