Eggplant

Eggplant (now Keysight) is an innovative leading testing automation company, with 650 customers ranging from medical to defence domains. Eggplant focuses on agility and innovation in its products and their development.

Eggplant experienced a rapid growth that enabled it to purchase other companies, one such being NCC Web Performance.

Technology

The Eggplant AI product is a multi-tiered codebase that must run both hosted in a SaaS context, and also locally on client machines. The technologies involved were as follows:

• Python3
• Flask & Flask-restful
• ReactJS
• Dojo
• C++
• Rust
• Ruby
• PostgreSQL
• ZeroMQ
• Docker
• AWS

My role

The aquisition of NCC Web Performance by Eggplant gave me the opportunity to become Team Lead of the Eggplant AI product team. I was given control of a 10-person team, including developers, QA, DevOps and technical writers, while retaining an active part in the application development.

Tech migration

Eggplant AI was a very new product written with Ruby, Dojo and PostgreSQL, a language that was not known within the team. To make it more competitive and maintainable, the Ruby portions were re-written in Python and the Dojo parts migrated to ReactJS.

SaaS hybrid

Despite being meant for on-premises installation, the product made use of web technologies, and it was felt that it would be very valuable to provide it as a cloud/SaaS offering to Egpglant's customers.

This meant the product needed to be modified and its infrastructure re-architected to make it work in this context. Some specialised services were written, and queue systems (ZeroMQ or AWS SQS) were introduced to convey work across the application services.