We designed, built, and scaled a seven-service microservices architecture powering a full-featured SaaS client portal — from the first commit to commercial launch and beyond, leading a team of four engineers across seven years of relentless product evolution.
The challenge
SuperOkay had a bold vision but zero technical foundation — no codebase, no infrastructure, no team. They needed a partner who could transform a blank canvas into a production-grade SaaS platform capable of competing in the crowded client portal market. The requirements were staggering: a rich-text document editor with real-time collaboration, kanban project management, a complete content library system, full white-label customization with automated custom domain provisioning and SSL certificates, subscription billing across multiple pricing tiers, automated PDF document generation, on-the-fly image optimization, a template marketplace backed by a headless CMS, and an architecture resilient enough to absorb seven years of continuous feature expansion without ever requiring a rewrite.
Our solution
We assembled a dedicated team and engineered a seven-service microservices architecture built for longevity. The core backend runs on Feathers.js 4 with MongoDB, exposing 53 real-time services over Socket.io — handling authentication via JWT and Google OAuth, role-based access control through CASL, subscription billing via Stripe and Chargebee webhooks, transactional email through SendGrid and Postmark, and file storage on AWS S3. The frontend is a Vue 2 single-page application with the Composition API, Vite, and Tailwind CSS, featuring a TipTap rich-text editor, kanban boards, a content library, and full white-label theming — all synchronized in real-time through feathers-vuex. We built a dedicated image CDN service on Fastify with Sharp and PostgreSQL via Prisma, delivering on-the-fly image resizing with intelligent caching and request deduplication. A print service powered by Koa.js and a Puppeteer headless Chrome cluster generates PDFs and screenshots at scale inside Docker containers. A portal meta service dynamically injects SEO metadata per tenant domain using Koa and Handlebars. The template marketplace runs on Strapi 3 with MongoDB, Cloudinary for media, and a GraphQL API. Finally, a custom vhost-manager service automates the entire custom domain lifecycle — DNS validation, Nginx virtual host configuration via Handlebars templates, and Let's Encrypt SSL certificate provisioning through Certbot — all orchestrated through a REST API with domain locking to prevent race conditions.
Results
- Engineered seven-service microservices architecture sustaining 7+ years of development with zero rewrites
- Built 53-service real-time backend on Feathers.js processing live collaboration via Socket.io
- Delivered TipTap rich-text editor with kanban boards, content library, and white-label theming in Vue
- Automated custom domain lifecycle with DNS validation, Nginx config generation, and Let's Encrypt SSL
- Built high-performance image CDN with Fastify and Sharp for on-the-fly optimization and caching
- Deployed Puppeteer cluster print service generating PDFs and screenshots inside Docker containers
- Integrated Stripe and Chargebee billing processing thousands of recurring subscription transactions