PetRescue is one of Australia’s largest online not-for-profit organisation providing online rescue awareness services to 950 different animal rescue groups including the RSPCA, Animal Welfare League and many small community groups.

PetRescue provides an online platform, which is one of the most highly visited charity sites in Australia, facilitating the rehoming of pets from animal rescue groups and pounds nationwide to their “fur-ever” homes. Whether it’s foster care or adoption, animal rescue groups can promote pets in need through the PetRescue website.

Due to the high traffic volume and having a relatively small team of seven employees, it is important that the PetRescue site is fast, responsive, easy to use and maintain.

PetRescue had an existing Ruby on Rails web application and needed a responsive team who could support and maintain their entire system from “servers to code”, including everything from provisioning on AWS, security patches and system updates as well as bug fixes and new feature development.

reinteractive stepped in and took on the challenges PetRescue were facing and migrated their entire system onto OpsCare, our 24/7 Operations as a Service. OpsCare is a month-to-month fixed price monitoring and maintenance service.

We also did a full code Inspection of their application and corrected situations found. We did a upgrade of their Ruby on Rails to the latest version.

During this migration, several key tasks were performed to prepare the application, which included:

• Full reinteractive Inspect service
• Ruby Upgrade
• Ruby on Rails Upgrade from version 3 to the latest version 4
• Code refactoring to correct situations found from the Inspect Service
• Removal of external dependent Wordpress Installation and integration of the blog system into the PetRescue stack, simplifying deployment and workflow
• Implementation of best practices for the code base, such as utilising S3 instead of the local file system
• Migration to the dedicated AWS/OpsCare platform from their entire servers

Due to the large scale of the project, PetRescue were initially cautious about the whole process, but were surprised, impressed and relieved at how smooth the migration went.

One of the core values at reinteractive is maintaining a high level of communication and transparency with our clients and this enabled PetRescue to maintain positive control of the process, whilst outsourcing the entire operations environment, drastically reducing the amount of work and mental overhead for their team.

Ongoing Operations and Code Maintenance

To keep the code quality bug-free and up-to-date at all times, PetRescue decided to sign up to the reinteractive CodeCare^® service providing ongoing month-to-month code maintenance and improvement to the application which ensures the PetRescue site maintains an efficient codebase, and is of the highest quality at all times.

The Benefits

• Increased response and expertise resulting in confidence and security in the PetRescue site application and operations environment
• Regular 100% uptime of the PetRescue website
• 24x7 Monitoring and break-fix support
• Proactive maintenance of the application stack
• Peace of mind and time for management to get on with core business functions
• Access to top-level developers and devops on demand, providing control over ongoing maintenance and development costs while continuing to improve the application
• Increased internal control and risk mitigation of the app, code and operations environment yet 100% outsourced.