Case study: How Lumin became more scalable

Cloud-based PDF collaboration platform Lumin has adopted new technology to help it become more scalable as it continues its expansion plans.

Max Ferguson, CEO and founder at Lumin told Digital Nation that the company was experiencing a high level of adoption and needed a solution to help it keep up with demand.

He said, “Within the first year, we had a million people using the platform and we needed a scalable solution for data storage. Something that no matter how fast Lumin grew, we could use and use some sort of storage solution that was working all the time and user friendly.”

As Lumin deals with annotations and PDF documents, the solution they chose created an easy way to store these digital documents.

Lumin implemented MongoDB in 2014 and then moved to its multi-cloud developer platform MongoDB Atlas.

Ferguson said, “In 2019, we moved to MongoDB Atlas, which allowed us to scale the database up quite quickly. Our internal operations team no longer had to worry about maintaining that database or scaling it out, they just knew that the database would keep running, and it would be backed up.”

Since then Ferguson said they have had an uptime of 99.9 percent and the platform has been “incredibly reliable”.

“[MongoDB] is a relatively common technology that a lot of developers work with, so when we're hiring new developers, it's been easy to bring them on board and get them working with MongoDB. I feel like if we had chosen a more obscure software stack, we would have had to do extra training for those developers,” he explained.

In the next 12 to 18 months, Lumin is looking to become a full software stack.  

Ferguson said, “That's allowing you to manage contracts, signed contracts, to be able to store and annotate and collaborate with other people. This is going to take a lot of product development, a lot that's happening right now behind the scenes and a lot more to come.

“We're hoping to use some of the MongoDB Atlas features like search and some of their more analytics-driven features so we can deliver a product suite to the customers.”

Ferguson said one of the exciting things about what they are doing at Lumin is bringing new capabilities to their customers.

“We saw during the pandemic a lot of people move their signing workflows over to a digital form and a lot of people adopted technologies like DocuSign. We are helping to democratise that with our new product which we have in the market right now called Bananasign. It's also backed onto MongoDB and that helps, provide a low-cost way to do your signing workflows.”