Journey to a Million - Derisking Scalability
Rently is a leading smart-home platform for both single-family and multi-family operations. They aim at elevating the rental journey with self-touring, smart home and leasing tech. Today they are working with over 3500 operators and facilitating more than 15 million self-tours, acting as a middleman between renters and property managers. After over 10 years of R&D, they are the only company to provide a full “street-to-suite” set of solutions, with a large team of experts and engineers within the IoT and technical field. There are many similar products on the market, which is why performance is key for them to succeed. With collaboration with IoTIFY, Rently was able to achieve the following key results:
- Securely test their Self Touring Smart Home Technology
- Device-to-device interaction simulation
- Validating the functional behavior at the scale: for up to 1 million devices
- Zero down-time reliability
- Recovery from System Disaster
Rently has been able to successfully launch IoT technologies, such as smart locks and advanced smart home appliances. With access to multiple patents on self-touring, and control by the USPTO, they are a popular all-in-one software solution for different real estate companies within the US/across the globe. Multifamily housing is being transformed by smart home technology, with renters today being increasingly tech-oriented. Rently accommodates several hardware options, which is in need of quick deployment and hardware compatibility. Rently also offers seamless software integrations with major property management systems, with possibility of upscaling to meet increased self-touring volume without any friction with other operational activities. IoTIFY collaborated with Rently to simulate their end to end smart home solution at scale.
One of the key challenges in the smart home technology industry is the simulation load testing with millions of devices, which entails the process of putting simulated demand on a software to demonstrate its behavior under different circumstances. Rently needed IoT device simulation to ensure that their smart home hub gateway was validated at the scale, and find scalability issues ahead of time. They needed a tool to validate the quality of their applications and its infrastructure through putting the system through a set of different dry-runs and simulations to find issues before their customers use it. From a business perspective, this load testing was important for Rently because they need to know in advance how much their software can handle an increasing number of customers in the future without any degradation in the quality of service. Especially because they encountered an issue like this in the past, where the platform's capability was uncertain, and therefore decided that they should always know in advance if their systems are ready for the future load coming in. Absence of performance testing can for instance cause loss of revenue, customers and productivity, which again will negatively affect their brand image. Using IoTIFY to do their load testing of their application, which contains Web and mobile apps, as well as IoT devices mainly, Rently can mimic real-time user load and the applications capabilities. A lot of companies that run on AWS believe that their solution is infinitely scalable, however this notion is incorrect. There are limitations to this service which Rently experienced in the past.
IoTIFY partnered with Rently Tours to use our Software as a service (SaaS) solutions to test their end-to-end software offering and ensure better product quality and platform resilience. The results show that the platform was more stable than before using IoTIFYs SaaS, because IoTIFY helped them validate their solution for 1 million devices. Now they have a roadmap for the future load up to 1 year down the line, which will ensure zero downtime for their solution, also enabling them to work out issues before they occur in real life. Using IoTIFY’s SaaS lets them focus completely on the development of their platform rather than testing. In terms of device modeling and stateful simulation, Rently could use IoTIFY’s template as a reference for other devices in their product category. Now that they have the scale test and stateful simulation capability, it has changed their development and release cycle, so whenever they for example roll out a new feature it has become easier for them to validate that scale to see if there has been any drop on performance or similar.
IoTIFY helped us securely test our Self Touring & Smart Home Technology through producing realistic data from millions of endpoints and simulating complex device-to-device interactions and validating the functional behavior at the scale. Using Nsim's unique stateful simulation model we could model our own system and validate various workflows''. This made it an ideal choice for rapid scalability testing and IoT application development. Additionally we have now avoided surprises when it comes to IoT cloud costs and can ensure zero down-time reliability.
To learn more about How IoTIFY helped achieved a Million+ connected object simulation for load testing AWS IoT based backend, please contact us.
