Refactoring Reasons

The main goal of this Billing Service refactoring project was to address the following performance issues of the Billing Process to provide some “breathing room” for customers with great workloads.

• Database connection timeouts that occur with every increased workload.

• Inefficient use of computing resources (application and database servers).

• Inefficient design of internal activities Billing Process.

• Lack of logging transparency.

Results After Refactoring

Having completed the first version of the Billing Service refactoring project, the following benefits have been observed and measured based on statistics gathered from the interworks.cloud production billing executions so far.

Performance benefits

• Reduced Subscription Renew Activity time to more than half.

  • Development statistics suggested ~70% faster activities.

  • interworks.cloud production dropped from 36' to 15' (~58% faster) while the number of subscriptions increased.

• Reduced Subscription Update Activity time to more than half.

  • Development statistics suggested ~65% faster activities.

  • Production statistics are expected in the following days.

• Reduced Billing Process execution (in total) by almost half.

  • The billing process is defined as all these steps that update subscriptions, generate charges, invoices, and payments.

    • Important note: Benefits on the total Billing Process execution are highly dependent on the client’s integrations, external systems performance and the number of email notifications sent on every billing run.

• Recorded execution duration for all Billing Activities (in seconds).

  • These numbers can be utilized to create charts and track Billing Service performance in the long run.

Development benefits

• Billing Service execution is more transparent and accessible to developers since the code is more structured, it facilitates better debugging, is free from legacy features and leftovers, and logs are more verbose.

What is Coming

Notifications Process

Move all Notifications to a new complementary and parallel process, to permanently reduce the total execution time of the Billing Service.

Invoicing parallelization

Refactor the Invoicing Activity to increase its throughput, leading to a faster invoicing process.

Renew and Status Updates parallelization

Execute the Renew and Status Update Activities at the same time, in parallel, decreasing even further the total execution time of the Billing Service.

Payments parallelization

Execute the Payments in parallel and not linearly, decreasing even further the total execution time of the Billing Service.

Billing Process per organization

Organizations will be able to schedule their own Billing Process according to their timezone and business preferences.

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