CloudNesil

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a computer and network security company. We provide threat intelligence services for SMBs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We needed their help in updating our entire cloud infrastructure.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We've been using a traditional AWS tech stack for quite some time and found that it’s best to upgrade it and provide a more dynamic environment for our customers. CloudNesil’s work for us centers on leveraging our infrastructure and operational support. They’re also in charge of strengthening our testing environment to ensure that our system is at its best.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with one resource from CloudNesil who’s in charge of everything — from project management to engineering.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

They were recommended to us by a recruiter that we once worked with.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in May 2020, and we continue to rely on CloudNesil’s cloud services.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

CloudNesil’s contribution to the maturity and scalability of our platform has been highly apparent. We wouldn’t have achieved this had it not been for their team’s expertise and support. As a startup, we have to make do with our limited resources, and CloudNesil has adapted to and dealt with these challenges pretty well.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

We mainly communicated via Slack and Zoom, and we’ve also given them access to our internal resources. We’re pleased to have collaborated with a very responsible and compliant CloudNesil member who delivers results on time and on par with our expectations.

What did you find most impressive about them?

CloudNesil accomplishes tasks with minimal supervision and involvement from our end. I appreciate their preciseness and respect for our time, which allows us to focus on other necessary tasks that we have to shed light on to streamline our operations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I only work with one engineer from their team, but I can infer from his work that CloudNesil provides quality services and nurtures great working relationships with their clients, so I don’t have any complaints.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a very clear understanding of what you need and present clear requirements to their team to help them kickstart the project with ease. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a software company that’s mainly focused on providing voice assistant services. Our main product is a voice assistant platform, and it’s a similar concept to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. The platform is a white-label solution that can be integrated into any hardware, whether it’s for home use or on mobile devices in whatever location.

My role is the technical program manager. I mainly work with the technical teams to help them facilitate the work, build roadmaps, and communicate any progress to stakeholders.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

Our platform was originally built for the English language. However, as we expand, we want to support more languages to be able to land in more countries. We needed native Turkish developers to work on our project. CloudNesil is an external team that we hired for Turkish language support.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

CloudNesil provides localized code and does backend development on our platform, which is built on Quantiphi. 

We gave them an interface to work with, and they handle that interface’s code. More specifically, they wrote the code that interprets the Turkish language so that it can be shown on our interface. This process involved natural language processing (NLP). We supported them with language specialists from our side to assist them in the task of developing the language interpretation.

What is the team composition?

Four developers from CloudNesil are assigned to the project. One of them sometimes acts as the team lead.

How did you come to work withCloudNesil?

I joined the company after they were hired, so I don’t really know how they were selected.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project about a year and a half ago, between late 2019 and early 2020. The project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They are hard workers. We have had some bumps in the road, but they’re always working to fix things and provide the best results they can.

How didCloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

On a scale from one to ten, I’d give them a seven in this regard. We have a weekly meeting and a Slack channel to communicate with them. We also have the project in Jira to organize our requests and roadmap.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I wouldn’t say that there’s something really special about them since I haven’t worked with other Turkish companies. I can’t really provide a comparison. We have teams from different companies in different countries.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They need a project manager on their side; there’s some micromanagement going on, and that’s not good for neither of us.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They have more of a technical lead than a team lead. Generally speaking, there’s no organization on their side when it comes to delivery. How you work and delivery details have to be in place and very clear with them for anyone to reach their goals.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the R&D director at a company that is developing IoT solutions. We aim to give meaning to the data of the companies and increase their efficiency with the solutions that we develop.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CloudNesil?

We took service from CloudNesil company for our IoT Platform that we develop such as passing to the scaleable architecture, developing the devops processes, backend and frontend development.

What were your goals for this project?

Our main goal is to pass our project to a scaleable architecture and to work trouble-free under heavy traffic.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We have found it at the recommendation of one of our friends that have worked with this company. We started to work together immediately due to CloudNesil team's technical abilities and their ability to understand the work.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Our main goal is to pass our project to a scaleable architecture and to work trouble-free under heavy traffic. For that purpose, we have eliminated the CI&CD deficiencies of our project by integrating the devops processes. Also we have completed the operation by receiving backend and fortend developing service to accelerate the developments at the some modules.

What was the team composition?

CloudNesil was composing the 8 people of the project team consisting of 12 people. Our team has been involved to the project with 4 people. CloudNesil has brought DevOps engineer, Backend and Frontend developer to the team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Our platform has become easily scaleable under heavy load through the project. By means of this, we can provide better service to our customers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We have used Jira for project management and GitLab for code repo and CI/CD. There has been no language barrier and most of the tasks have been completed on time. The most of the obstacles or delays at the project have been derived from the accidents or not being sufficiently supported by us.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their flexibility and technical expertise at the sources were remarkable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Everything went well throughout the project.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of Cressoft Consultancy Limited, which is a management consulting firm.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We needed help with implementing products for our end clients.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

CloudNesil has been involved in two projects. They’re using reactive technologies like Kafka, Lambda functions, Java 8, and Scala.

In the first project, their team used Scala and Java SDK. They defined AWS resources using Spark Job Server, which was then deployed to EC2 instances. Their team manages the infrastructure.

In the second project, they work on the backend and UX/UI of an application. Their team implemented microservices using serverless architecture in Node.js.

The database, called DynamoDB, captures events that the architecture sorts. These events are sourced into Kinesis Data Stream. Then, the data stream uses the Lambda functions to create reports and data for the customers.

I started another contract with them for an e-commerce business. Their team’s working on the payment section of the client’s website.

What is the team composition?

At the moment, we work with three people from CloudNesil. But, I’ve worked with a total of eight individuals on this project.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

I worked with their team on a loyalty mobile app, which was used by many customers. I liked the way they worked and their deliverables. I decided to continue working with them for other clients as well.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent a total of $175,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership began in January 2018, and it's ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I’m happy to work with them because the end clients are happy. For the first project, our client was extremely happy with the resources CloudNesil provided. For the second project, I had a call with the end client’s CTO who was extremely happy with CloudNesil.

Their team includes powerful DevOps engineers. They’re good with cloud technologies, CI/CD Pipeline (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment Pipeline), and AWS management. All of their code is covered by automation tests, which are run in an automated way using TDD (test-driven development).

Their team has experts in open source technologies, serverless architecture, and NodeJS. They have quality Amazon developers as well.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

We receive Agile reports after each sprint and the completion of tickets. They use Trello.

Their team delivers on time and creates efficient AWS resources managed by Command Line. They communicate well, which makes them suitable for offshore development.

What did you find most impressive about them?

CloudNesil has a variety of strengths including AWS, Java, Scala, and Kafka. They also have impressive Cloud and Agile skills. When necessary, their team works extra hours.

They can also concentrate on a project. Even though they work on other projects at the same time, their team doesn’t get distracted. They’re committed to delivering high-quality code on time.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, what they’re doing is great. There’s no need to make any improvements.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a startup software company building tools to preserve and enhance the value of data, while protecting the privacy of the individuals that generate the data.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

1. For what projects/services did your company hire CloudNesil?

To assist with architecture, design, implementation and testing of a new Big Data processing product built using Apache Spark. Also, to support the existing development and QA teams with full DevOps services.

What were your goals for this project?

To deliver a beta implementation of a new data processing engine by mid January 2020.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We found Cloudnesil on UpWork.com. We interviewed several competing agencies and individuals, and selected Cloudnesil based on several factors including:

• Their specific technical expertise in desired technologies such as Cassandra, Apache Spark and Kubernetes
• Previous experience with architecting Big Data systems
• Their ability to onboard quickly
• Their competitive rates
• English skills

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Cloudnesil engineers provide architecture, design, development and DevOps services for a BigData product that Anonos is building. They are embedded into our existing team and perform daily tasks that include coding, documentation, automated CI/CD pipelines, and design suggestions. They have investigated new technologies and compared/contrasted different approaches to help us select the best way forward for our product implementation. Cloudnesil has also implemented our existing system in Kubernetes to make delivery and deployment easier.

What was the team composition?

Cloudnesil has provided 3 full time engineers to Anonos, which complement our existing team of 7 engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The Kubernetes implementation Cloudnesil built has been delivered to our partner organization for evaluation and testing. The Apache Spark implementation is nearing Beta completion, targeting later this month. I am very happy with the engagement and plan to continue working with Cloudnesil to build out our product going forward.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project has run smoothly and we have daily communication over Slack and GitHub. An important requirement for Anonos is English language communication skills, and the engineers at Cloudnesil have average to well above average English skills in my experience. CloudNesil is transparent about progress and always available for an update.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Knowledge of modern Big Data technologies (Spark, Cassandra) and cloud deployment technologies (Kubernetes, AWS).

Are there any areas for improvement?

None.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the co-founder of Tasq. Tasq is an intelligent workflow platform that translates data into action, with focus on Oil & Gas onshore production operations. We run a suite of analytical and machine learning algorithms such as anomaly detection, classification, and value calculations to determine the most optimal and valuable tasks everyday and connect engineers to field actions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CloudNesil?

We needed to move our on-prem services to the cloud. CloudNesil assisted in designing and building our backend infrastructure utilizing modern serverless deployment and AWS resources.

What were your goals for this project?

The primary goals for the project was to be able to upload time-series data and perform ETL and machine learning predictions, store the results on cloud resources, create the capabilities to bring on multiple clients, and set up a devops process.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We selected this vendor through developer freelance / contracting site and selected CloudNesil due to their expertise in cloud architecture and pricing.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The project required setting up multiple ETL processes for machine learning ingestion, standing up a file-system datalake, serverless deployment to enable dev / staging / prod environments, and setting up monitoring and alarm resources. We initially provided a rough architecture diagram. CloudNesil provided feedback and assisted with the sprint planning. Once the sprints were planned out, CloudNesil completed the tasks turn-key. They would demonstrate completed features as well as QA/QC code. They were responsible for primarily building out the backend.

What was the team composition?

CloudNesil comprised of half the project team of six. The others included myself and two other independent contract developers. CloudNesil brought cloud architecture, DevOps engineer, and Backend developer to the team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The resulting work brought by the team is invaluable, allowing us to continue developing our product utilizing cloud resources. Being able to promote our ability to scale in the cloud has been a marketing feature we've been able to engage with prospective clients.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We utilized Jira for project management and GitLab for repository and CI/CD. There were no language barriers and most tasks were completed timely. Much of the barriers or delays in the project were due to unexpected events or not having tasks detailed fully by the client.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their flexibility in resources and technical expertise stood out.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The experience was largely positive. If I were to do this over again, I would probably have them take on more of the project management side.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the co-founders of aifora. Our platform uses big data architecture and a demand forecasting engine to help retailers optimize their businesses. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We engaged CloudNesil to help set up the big data architecture and write the backend services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We needed a web interface for clients to access their data. We wrote a frontend application in Angular; the backend uses a microservice architecture to calculate and process the data presented on the frontend. 

CloudNesil is writing the backend services in Scala and Java. We provided them with a list of business needs and technical requirements before they started development. They complete work in an agile framework.

What is the team composition?

We work with three people.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

We looked for external support on Upwork. After speaking to a few people, we found the founder of CloudNesil highly qualified and liked his ideas on how their team could support us. We decided to go with them.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent around €40,000–€50,000 (approximately $45,000–$57,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in October 2018, and it is an ongoing project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re satisfied with CloudNesil’s work so far. They’re leading a productive development process, and we’ve moved to shorter release cycles.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

We serve as project managers over their team of developers. We have daily stand-ups with their team and use Slack for regular communication. Each sprint and its set of tasks is organized through Jira. CloudNesil is highly accessible and can arrange tasks among themselves if needed, which we appreciate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

CloudNesil works hard to understand our product and our business more fully. They can work in very short cycles and consistently improve on our platform. We’ve had a really successful collaboration.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, everything has run smoothly so far.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a small open-source consulting firm based in Paris, France. We service medium to large-sized companies, as well as startups, occasionally, as an accelerator. Most of our customers are fintechs, but we’ve been diversifying lately.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We typically work on fairly large projects, which often require additional developers. We’ve worked on multiple different projects, the latest concerning a video editing platform and a collaborative tool for the advertising industry.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project has involved a fair amount of infrastructure development. It’s an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, and the entire application is put into containers in Docker. Every critical component is clustered using Docker’s swarm mode. They also worked on the frontend of the web application.

We use a number of open-source platforms, such as Apache Cassandra as a NoSQL database. We also use Redis and have an application server. It’s a fairly involved, high-level platform that’s intended to scale to a large size.

What is the team composition?

We have a project manager for the video editing platform as it’s a larger project. The whole team size varies and CloudNesil’s been flexible with downsizing and scaling it back up, as needed. We’ve gone from three developers to five or six at different times.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

I posted something online and they got in touch, so I first met someone from CloudNesil in 2014. Although we didn’t choose them at that time, I quite liked them, so I went to them for our next project, which was in 2016.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent several thousand euros. It’s a fair amount.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in March 2017 and the engagement is ongoing. The project began in late-2016, but the negotiation with the client took a couple of months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They’ve allowed me to be very agile in terms of team scaling, providing the right resources when I need them. They always bring in very competent, pleasant people. Overall, the collaboration has allowed me to take on more projects, delegate a lot of the work, and do more direct project management with them.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

The key developers all speak English well to very well, so management is not a problem. Some of the junior developers are not as proficient, but there’s always someone else with them as they work in teams. We’ve not had any problems.

The documentation is as detailed and appropriate as necessary. Depending on the guidelines we provide them, they draft the requirements and provide us with the required amount of detail.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re always available and will extend their work hours if there’s a critical issue. They’re diligent, professional, and take their work seriously. I know I can rely on them; I wouldn’t have taken on some of these projects if I wasn’t sure that I had a partner like CloudNesil.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Their competence is really good in a lot of domains, so they can contribute in many different ways, from low-level networking to infrastructure management, back- and frontend development, and even security. I sometimes wish they could provide even more developers, but they have other clients and can become stretched.

They’re quite conservative in how they grow. I have a longstanding relationship with their founder, so I know how they work: he’s very diligent about onboarding more developers. They’re quite careful about whom they bring on to not downgrade the quality of the service.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

No.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a lead developer and architect for a FinTech start-up.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We needed UI development and cloud consulting for our platform rather than the old-fashioned way of having servers located in our premises. We wanted to have the platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our developers are really experienced in the financial industry but hadn’t done anything in the cloud or with UI in a modern HTML5 and JavaScript UI.

CloudNesil is experienced in cloud computing. They gave us a couple of ideas for the service architecture and the UI side. They introduced us to ReactJS and all the framework around React, which we like a lot. We gave them our API and they built our whole UI on top of those APIs. They also helped us with some technical issues with AWS.

What is the team composition?

We’re in contact with the owner. Depending on the issue at the time, he dedicates a particular developer to us—three in total so far. We always interview the developers that we’re going to work with.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

We looked at a couple of options. Originally, we wanted to hire contractors with the experience we were looking for. A friend of mine told me about CloudNesil and that they were experienced with the technologies we needed. I contacted them and went from there.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent between $10,000–$25,000 USD.

What is the status of this engagement?

The engagement began in April 2017 and is an ongoing partnership.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re happy with the quality of their work— we wouldn’t still be working with them otherwise. We’re planning on working with them on an ongoing basis in the future as well.

The UI work has been a wow factor in our system. A couple of clients decided to use us after they saw how modern and interactive our UI is. As a data processing company, without UI there isn’t much to show our clients, but the UI they built helped us a lot with sales.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

Once they assign the developer to us, there isn’t much project management on their side as we manage our own resources. They always find developers that suits our needs and have never come back saying none are available. That’s a sign that they’re doing a good job in project management.

When working with a developer, we use our own Trello boards. We have daily stand-ups which they join in with as well. We also use Slack to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They take the initiative and introduce us to new technologies. The developer doesn’t just raise the issue but comes up with options for us to choose from, which has helped us a lot. It’s something I haven’t seen before in outsourcing projects.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing that I can think of right now.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I run the business division for an e-commerce company in Southeast Asia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CloudNesil?

We needed to build a platform with scalable cloud-based technologies.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They designed a Java OCA platform from scratch. It sends automated dispatch orders to drivers. CloudNesil reviewed all the OCA actors, built the notification service, and integrated it with Twilio, Slack, WhatsApp, and MailChimp.

What is the team composition?

We interacted with a project manager. They oversaw a team of about 10 developers.

How did you come to work with CloudNesil?

We found them on Freelancer and had worked with them before. We knew they had experience in this field.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in May 2017. The project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We stopped the platform pilot before it went live. Ultimately, their work didn’t have any effect, but we were happy with their development skills and their output.

How did CloudNesil perform from a project management standpoint?

We followed an agile approach. A lot of our communication was through Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their knowledge of cloud-based technologies is impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication is a weak point. They should be much more proactive and work on their communication skills.