Michele Silletti

This site features cloud infrastructure design for all web properties of the group. The project's scope was migrating from classic hosting to a multi-zone cloud environment. This new environment had to be resilient, able to manage 3Mpv/month, and able to react to traffic peaks in less than 5m (e.g., during F1 events, traffic increases 10 times, and in case of an accident 40 times).

We chose AWS and redesigned apps to take advantage of all AWS components like computational instances, dedicated databases, load balancers, Memcached servers, CDN, and PHP optimizations. Load tests demonstrated good results, with >80% savings on starting costs. Nowadays, the infrastructure is composed of several Amazon EC2 instances and several RDS instances in multi-zone + multi-read replicas. We increased the total number of instances to 200. The infrastructure also takes advantage of Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

I grew this startup from its 2010 inception until its market launch, firstly as the CEO and CTO and later delegating the CEO role in order to focus on tech matters. During that time, I performed usability tests on the interface, filed a patent for a technology used in the app, and struck deals with major European credit card processors. The team studied market strategies, managed the business budget, and presented the idea to many shows, contests, investors, etc. As CTO, I coordinated the development of four different apps descending from the various product evolutions. We developed for Android, iOS, and the web.

The multi-platform mobile app was successfully developed for Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices, providing users with a seamless experience to save queuing time. You can use Qurami in selected universities, hospitals, or public offices to get a virtual queue ticket and monitor the queue directly from your smartphone.

Server architecture is based on Silex and communicates with remote Java agents through the XMPP protocol. The server provides an API to interact with mobile devices. We implemented a robust solution on the AWS stack to handle a large number of remote agents (potentially thousands), ensuring scalability, stability, and privacy. Also, we addressed critical management points to support distributed operations across various locations in Italy for Qurami.

Punctis is a web app for social engagement. Its main purpose is to collect user actions on several websites and assign prizes for those actions. I came in to create a production infrastructure to serve big customers, such as news websites and big brands.

I designed their infrastructure, handling development, testing, and production environments with automated migrations and scalability. It was all implemented on AWS using EC2 and RDS. Since the main load is not the website but the REST API, we decided not to use CloudFront.

Beatpick is a web app developed in Symphony2, making use of a media server and media player from Adobe. My work consists of three main tasks: changing the app to manage Japanese market differences, keeping the original app working, and managing automated migrations to different versions.

I replaced all proprietary technology from Amazon with open source products (provided and configured by other team members), ensuring no disruption happened in the platform. I also migrated the whole application and media library to AWS using EC2, RDS, S3, and CloudFront (including stress test and automation for fail recovery).

I worked on several different projects for Telethon, including the payment form currently in use online. I handled UX and CMS development using Drupal, the integrating PayPal API. Some other modules to track referrals and enable external inclusion of the form are also used. The electronic card module was based on a crowdsourced contest on 99design. The registration form is for a national initiative in multiple locations called Walk of Life. The project was simple, but the timeframe was very short; I had five days in total and managed it while working with an offshore development team.

A ticket marketplace for concerts and events. It's a Symfony 1.4 project that features many external APIs for shipping (UPS), payments (PayPal), and SMS (PROmemo). It features a multilingual portal in it-en-es-ru. The project is long-term and employs developers from many countries with a very short turnover. The most important issue to manage is the knowledge transfer. Recently I managed the infrastructure renewal, migrating the app from Ubuntu 8 to Ubuntu 14, automating deployment, and migrating versioning from SVN to Git. The server infrastructure is partly in Amsterdam and partly in Barcelona. It's pretty small as it is composed of one web server and one database.