mambo EMM - Building an Enterprise Mobile Management Platform
Working at Mambo Mobility I'm the lead developer, and for over a year the only developer working on the backend and infrastructure portion, to build mambo EMM from the ground up.
Since starting I've transitioned into also being the official team lead to the current team of 7 developers; planning milestones and long-term roadmap tasks, judging timeline feasibility and giving feedback on product requests, and representing my team to help them grow and upskill constantly to be the best they can be.
As it stands now, mambo EMM is an Android-focused enterprise mobile management platform with over 200,000 devices managed. On top of the standard Android Management API features offered, my team and I built multiple additional offerings to customers including; responsive real-time updates via WebSockets, browser-based Android remote control service using WebRTC, and near real-time location updates and device location history to keep a detailed track of all devices deployed in the field.
The first challenge to overcome when building an enterprise platform from nothing was to create a functional development environment, and a customer-facing environment to pair with it. Hot reload, automated deployment, and a test environment that matches the setup of production with much lower resource tiers were the first 3 design points that were implemented to create a smooth initial development to production flow.
By utilizing Docker Compose I created a duplicate environment between the local setup and production servers, using services like MailDev to replace typical third-party SMTP dependency and speed up the flow when testing login, reset, and other customer comms flows.
I also developed a custom Dockerimage for the production and staging servers to use, with a restricted base and all dependencies bundled for quick deployment. This in turn allowed for any deployment to be built, analyzed for vulnerabilities, and automatically updated within the infrastructure with a simple seamless CI/CD pipeline built around GitLab's CI/CD feature.
With a duplicate setup between local development, production, and staging servers, and a fast simple CI/CD pipeline this allowed for compatibility testing, fast-paced feature development, and a stable workflow which helped new engineers quickly onboard and get to working on the product without extensive configuration and setup.
During development, the company also decided to pursue ISO 27001 certification, the processes for which I implemented within the mambo teams workflow. This included automated vulnerability and dependency testing to be addressed based on the issue priority, team collaboration and discussion on work cycles and assigned issues before submitting the committed workflow to management, and secure handling and storage of any and all API keys, logins, and other platform data.
The 3-year journey of mambo EMM so far has led me to design and implement several complex and rewarding features that have massively contributed to the viability of mambo EMM as a leading competitor in the space.
This includes complex prioritized queues for managing long-running and high-resource tasks like syncing hundreds of thousands of devices from Google's servers into our own database with advanced search, filtering, and custom-generated reports.
Utilizing Android notifications and managed config, together with our Android developer, to design flows to customize device policies or fetch location updates across thousands of devices at once.
Possibly the most complex and impressive feature; a remote control system to view and control Android devices in high-definition and real-time from a browser. Built on WebRTC for direct p2p communication between clients and their devices in the field, and using WebSockets as a setup layer, I took just under 2 months to go from discussion, to design and documentation, to implementation of the fully functional remote control system, with our team Android engineer implementing the design within mambo's companion app to bring this functionality to every fully managed Android device.
Working on mambo EMM has aided my own personal progress immensely, not just in discussing and implementing feature requests and working with toolsets and tech stacks for every area of platform development and management, but also as a team lead for the engineers I work with daily.
I've had the opportunity to work together with my team and do what I can for them to constantly upskill and improve, facilitate open discussions and contributions to throw out any idea they have without doubt, and for each of us to be able to able to review and discuss each others work in a way that we can all learn and continuously improve from each others feedback.
I've been leading the ship for mambo from the start, and as I've developed and become the official team lead I've gained the experience to manage a team, lead a successful product, problem-solve and optimize in every area of engineering, and impart my knowledge and experience on my team members constantly to have them grow from juniors to highly experienced engineers at a rapid pace.
