Lizza (YC22) is a startup based in Mexico that is revolutionizing how businesses sell to their customers directly on social media platforms like Instagram or WhatsApp, by providing a suite of tools for payments, shipping, messaging and marketing.

The Challenge: A limiting legacy monolith on Firebase

Before adopting the Encore platform, Lizza’s e-commerce platform was built using Firebase. It had a large monolithic codebase, which over time had become disorganized, blurring the frontend and backend lines. This made new development slow and error-prone, ultimately making it hard to deliver features at speed while maintaining quality.

To solve this, the Lizza team wanted to move to a microservices architecture and refactor their existing application to implement a structure better suited for their domain. This meant overcoming several challenges:

• Transitioning from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture to better structure their application, without slowing down product development
• Managing the complexity of working with microservices, including observability and infrastructure management
• Avoiding the need to hire additional engineers to solely work on DevOps and infrastructure

Picking the Encore platform as a solution for building scalable and efficient microservices

Lizza turned to the Encore platform as the solution to these challenges. With the Encore platform, they were able to:

• Easily transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture, allowing for better structure and scalability
• Manage the complexity of working with microservices through the Encore platform's observability and infrastructure management capabilities, without needing to hire additional engineers for DevOps
• Streamline infrastructure management using the Encore platform's declarative Backend Framework, reducing both cloud waste and DevOps workload
• Deliver high-quality microservices at a rapid pace, thanks to the simplified development process

The Results: 3x delivery speed and 100+ hours saved per month

By adopting the Encore platform, Lizza was able to achieve meaningful results:

• Increased delivery speed by 3x
• Reduced time spent on DevOps by 100+ hours per month
• Successful and timely migration from Firebase to Go-based microservices, without hiring dedicated DevOps engineers

“Lizza's backend team loves Encore! We can now deliver high-quality microservices super quickly. Encore lets us offload the microservices complexity and avoid hiring additional engineers to work on DevOps.”

Conclusion

Lizza's successful migration, from a monolithic architecture on Firebase to a microservices architecture using the Encore platform, highlights the transformative power of the right developer platform.

By leveraging the Encore platform's streamlined approach, Lizza was able to manage the complexity of working with microservices and streamline infrastructure management, reducing both cloud complexity and DevOps workload. This has allowed them to deliver new functionality at a rapid pace, ultimately paving the way for future growth and success.