Legislapp optimizes its website performance with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Founded in 2016, Legislapp provides a technology platform for government relations and lobbying professionals. Its software applies real-time monitoring of public government data and automatically maps registered proposals and legislative changes to keep users informed of relevant changes. The aim is to bring citizens and professionals closer to politics with a simple, intuitive, and accessible solution available in a multichannel format.

To carry out this 360-degree government monitoring with automatic mapping, the startup counted on the elasticity of cloud computing. But until recently, Legislapp had an IT infrastructure in an on-premises environment. Working with a large and growing volume of customers as well as data, the SaaS platform and web application began to experience performance issues that led to complaints from customers.

In addition, the company could not dynamically scale its computational infrastructure, which made it difficult to keep up with growth. As such, the technical team rewrote the application in a technology compatible with Kubernetes and decided to migrate to a cloud service with high availability that could scale with its growth.

Legislapp leaders sought the Oracle for Startups program, aiming to adopt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With this, the startup obtained cloud credits equating to a 70% discount on infrastructure and platform service invoices for two years, in addition to mentoring, migration assistance, and technical support in a practical way.

OCI would also allow Legislapp to increase the number of robot crawlers more quickly, thanks to the high performance of CPUs from Oracle's cloud. These bots are essential for Legislapp’s data processing, generating gains in scale and increasing the number of mappable data sources, which was already a demand from most of the company's customers.

Before the migration to OCI, Legislapp faced high fixed costs due to licensing issues and static performance. After adopting OCI, the company saw a 40% drop in costs for servers, licenses, and other infrastructure spending. With the adoption of Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler, the company also achieved an 80% reduction in data processing during the legislative recess, which generated significant cost savings.

Another critical improvement was the creation of crawling robots that search for the topics that are relevant to the startup's customers. Previously, in its on-premises environment, the company had a limitation on the creation of these bots due to infrastructure constraints. But on OCI, using K8S clusters and a CI/CD pipeline—a series of steps that must be performed in order to deliver a new version of software—the startup can create an unlimited number of robots without worrying about infrastructure provisioning.

The migration to OCI also generated a significant improvement in the performance of Legislapp’s website, with loading times on the home page reduced by 85%, or from 20 seconds to 3 seconds. As a result, the number of organic accesses via search engines increased by 44% as the page became better ranked, which helped expand customer acquisition.

Using OCI’s load balancing options, Legislapp optimized performance and reduced latency, thanks to the automatic detection of server problems and the ability to redirect traffic to other available servers. This balancing also allows the company to perform fixes without worrying about service downtime. The startup now also has an automatic backup routine, eliminating operational tasks and allowing the infrastructure team to focus on more strategic functions.