Manufacturers and retailers lose billions of dollars every year from people returning perfectly good products because they can’t make sense of the complicated setup and installation instructions. Gadget Software is working to eliminate these problems by converting static user manuals into easy-to-follow, dynamic instructions that consumers and service technicians can retrieve with QR codes and view on any mobile device.

“The problem with traditional instruction manuals is their format,” says Max Riggsbee, Gadget Software’s chief product officer. “They don’t allow people to interact with their content.”

Making manuals more manageable

Founded in 2014 in Newark, New Jersey, Gadget Software uses a combination of data science, natural language processing, and machine learning to analyze the data structures of PDF files, deconstruct those structures into individual records, and then combine all the records into a virtual publishing platform.

Because PDFs are flat files filled with unstructured information, “their content is virtually glued to the page,” Riggsbee says. “It can’t be changed without rewriting the file and then uploading an entirely new version.” But when those PDFs go through Gadget Software’s conversion engine, “we can restructure the content into row and column data, store it inside a database, and then output it into our mobile app, where it can be updated, organized, and consumed on demand.”

Maxwell Riggsbee, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Gadget Software (courtesy of Gadget Software)

Gadget shares how the company moved its cloud native document virtualization platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from Amazon Web Services (AWS), during an episode of the Built and Deployed video series, which features conversations with software architects about how they’re using OCI.

“One of the main reasons we chose OCI is because Oracle immediately showed interest in what our needs were and has continuously worked to make sure our needs are met,” says Matt Goldensohn, Gadget Software’s head of architecture. “For a lot of other cloud vendors that we talked to, we’re just some small company.”

Isolation and control

Gadget Software launched its first-generation, cloud native platform without much in the way of a data security strategy or tools to protect its environment.

“We’d opened up Port 80 and Port 443 to the world, assuming everybody would play nice,” Goldensohn admits. “We had no concept of DDoS or any other attack vectors that were targeting open ports in Apache Tomcat applications, which were the core of our HTTP services at the time.” Immediately after Gadget’s first denial-of-service attack, “we became obsessed with complying with SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR, and many other security protocols.”

Since Gadget moved its platform to OCI, “we’re completely encrypted from the browser all the way down to the backend,” Goldensohn says. Using Oracle’s Quick Form and Terraform scripts, “we now have all of the building blocks we need to maintain compliance with the CIS benchmarks.”

With OCI’s built-in security protocols, Gadget also uses OCI’s isolation management tools, which relieve the company’s infrastructure team from having to write management scripts for the company’s relational database environment. Now, the team can focus on building repositories for new customers, expanding repositories for existing customers, and then maintaining those repositories in either fully isolated or shared database environments.

“This is exactly where we want to be,” Goldensohn says. “I don’t want to be engineering my instances. Instead, I want our infrastructure team to be repurposing infrastructure-as-code, so we have a consistent way of building and testing new products.”

Gadget also uses OCI’s isolation management tools to monitor its production environment. “This helps us spend less time researching, developing, and deploying, and more time tracking the performance of our platform,” Goldensohn says. “And, with OCI’s security isolation, we can control access and manage the entire system with fewer people.”

Scale on demand

Adapting quickly to changes in capacity required by different types of customers, workloads, and user devices is key for Gadget, and the number one reason it uses Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). “Using OKE helps us quickly scale up to support a surge in new mobile customers signing on to our platform, regardless of where they are located or the size of their workload,” Goldensohn says.

Not only can Goldensohn’s team expand their compute and presentation capacity as needed to support a demand surge, but they can also scale back down when demand tapers off. The design of OKE also allows Goldensohn’s team to set the minimum number of concurrent processes that are running in an instance.

“From an availability perspective, we can take a particular module or service, duplicate it, and then run it in three separate locations,” he says. “That’s merely a single specification in OKE.”

Conclusion

Every use case is different. The only way to know if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is right for you is to try it. You can select either the Oracle Cloud Free Tier or a 30-day free trial, which includes US$300 in credit to get you started with a range of services, including compute, storage, and networking.