A-Dev

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Department Manager of Porterhouse Management LLC

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Porterhouse management is a management consulting firm focusing on delivering value for the Private Equity Saas markets. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire A-Dev to accomplish?

• migrate our on-premises infrastructure to Azure
• optimize our cloud resources
• ensure best practices in cloud architecture

SOLUTION

How did you find A-Dev?

Referral

Why did you select A-Dev over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Referred to me

How many teammates from A-Dev were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope of work was extensive, covering several critical areas necessary for a successful cloud transition:

1. Assessment and Planning:
   • A-Dev began with a comprehensive assessment of our existing infrastructure, identifying key areas for optimization and determining the most effective migration strategy. They provided a detailed migration plan, including timelines, risk management strategies, and resource allocation, ensuring a smooth transition to the Azure cloud environment.
2. Cloud Architecture Design:
   • They designed a scalable and secure cloud architecture tailored to our specific needs. This included setting up virtual networks, storage solutions, and identity management systems within Azure. Their design focused on maximizing performance while ensuring cost efficiency and future scalability.
3. Migration and Implementation:
   • The migration process involved transferring our on-premises applications, data, and workloads to Azure with minimal downtime. A-Dev handled the entire migration, from configuring Azure services to ensuring that all applications were fully operational post-migration. They also implemented automated backup and disaster recovery solutions to enhance our system's resilience.
4. Training and Support:
   • To ensure our team could effectively manage the new cloud environment, A-Dev provided extensive training sessions. These included hands-on workshops on Azure management, security practices, and cost optimization. They also offered ongoing support post-migration, addressing any questions or issues that arose as we adjusted to the new system.

Key Deliverables:

• Comprehensive assessment report and migration plan.
• Custom-designed Azure cloud architecture with security and scalability in mind.
• Successful migration of applications, data, and workloads to Azure with minimal downtime.
• Automated backup, disaster recovery, and monitoring systems.
• Detailed training program for our internal team on Azure management and best practices

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The project with A-Dev led to several significant and measurable outcomes that have positively impacted our operations:

1. Improved System Performance: Post-migration, we observed a 40% improvement in system performance, thanks to the optimized cloud architecture and resource allocation within Azure. Our applications now run more smoothly, with enhanced responsiveness and scalability.
2. Cost Efficiency: By leveraging Azure's cost management tools and optimizing resource usage, we achieved a 25% reduction in cloud operating costs. A-Dev helped us identify and eliminate unnecessary expenses, ensuring we only pay for what we need.
3. Increased Uptime and Reliability: The implementation of automated backup and disaster recovery solutions has resulted in a 99.9% system uptime, significantly reducing the risk of data loss and ensuring business continuity.
4. Enhanced Team Capability: The training provided by A-Dev has empowered our internal team, increasing their proficiency in Azure management by 50%. They now have the skills to maintain and optimize our cloud environment, leading to more efficient operations.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Timeliness:

• A-Dev delivered all project milestones on time, adhering strictly to the project schedule. They provided regular updates and maintained clear communication throughout the engagement, ensuring that we were always informed of progress and any potential challenges.

Responsiveness to Needs:

• The team at A-Dev was highly responsive to our needs, quickly addressing any concerns and adapting their approach based on our feedback. Their proactive communication style and willingness to go the extra mile ensured that all our requirements were met, often exceeding our expectations.

 Their ability to keep the project on track, despite its complexity, was highly commendable.

What was your primary form of communication with A-Dev?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

What impressed us most about A-Dev was their deep understanding of Azure cloud technologies and our business needs. They didn’t just provide a technical solution; they delivered a strategy that aligned perfectly with our goals, ensuring a seamless transition to the cloud. Their ability to anticipate challenges and proactively address them before they impacted the project was truly unique.

Additionally, their commitment to upskilling our team was exceptional. The training they provided was not just a one-time event but a comprehensive program that ensured our team could confidently manage and optimize our new cloud environment. This level of investment in our success made them more than just a service provider—they became a true partner in our cloud journey.

Are there any areas for improvement or something A-Dev could have done differently?

While our experience with A-Dev was overwhelmingly positive, there are a few areas where we see room for improvement:

Post-Migration Support:

• While the ongoing support provided was valuable, a more structured follow-up process could be beneficial. Regular check-ins or a formal post-implementation review could help ensure any lingering issues are quickly addressed and that the transition to the new environment is fully optimized.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the Founder / CEO of a Technology Consultancy 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a technology consultancy based in Indonesia specializing in custom-built enterprise solutions. We've delivered impactful end-to-end solutions to clients from industries ranging from e-commerce to fintech.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire A-Dev to accomplish?

• Setup Google Cloud infrastructure for a greenfield custom ERP solution

SOLUTION

How did you find A-Dev?

Upwork

Why did you select A-Dev over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fits our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from A-Dev were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Gather all the information on the MVP and prepare 
• Landing Zone Concept diagram 
• Create CI/CD for infrastructure spin-up 
• Create non-prod environment - FE + BE + PSQL 15 
• Deploy prod environment 
• Configure CI/CD for FE/BE deployment 
• Configure Cloudflare for non-prod Deploy code to prod 
• Configure IAM policies for: developers, devops/infra_admin, product_owner 
• Set up maintenance periods (regular shutdowns for non-prod out of hours) 
• Configure budget alarms (after setting expectations with stakeholders and engineers)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The software was up and running. Clients employees are able to use the custom ERP we've built.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Yes. They delivered all the items on time. Denys was very responsive to our requests despite living in a warzone (Ukraine) and facing health issues.

What was your primary form of communication with A-Dev?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They delivered all work expectations under the constraints.

Are there any areas for improvement or something A-Dev could have done differently?

The pricing could have been more market competitive.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Recruitment Specialist of Artel Outstaffing Global

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We connect smart and reliable people with the right opportunities in IT world

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire A Dev to accomplish?

• Fulfill missing DevOps expertise
• Get quality infrastructure, cloud and software development services
• Advance modern approach to delivery processes

SOLUTION

How did you find A Dev?

• Online Search
• Other

Why did you select A Dev over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from A Dev were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Setting up CI/CD processes across various dependent and independent projects 
• Switching Infrastructure management to Infrastructure as Code approach 
• Adding consistent team processes to deliver reliable results 
• Creating consistent documentation for easier on/off-boarding processes in the team 
• Management of codebases in Azure DevOps 
• Implementation of Code Analysis during build of services 
• Switching from chaotic teamwork to Scrum processes, onboarding of all team members to new process 
• Enforcing high test coverage for new and legacy code 
• Implementing Azure Functions for microservices and integrating it with Azure App Services and all underlying services 
• Setup from scratch Azure and Azure DevOps for new product 
• Implementation of Docker-based environment for local work (including around 10 services in total integrated inside one compose)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• CI/CD coverage for git repos is 100%
• All CI/CD pipelines should be templated
• Time to deliver new solution on initial version is less than 1 week 
• Infrastructure, IAM and security should be covered with code for 100% 
• The team should have delivered at least 80% of planned backlog within one sprint

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

• Implemented Scrum process in the hybrid team 
• Set up proper task tracking and efficient meetings schedule 
• Delivery is being tracked on time, so everything is being delivered on time and we never had any issues on that.

What was your primary form of communication with A Dev?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They provide IT services to a wide range of businesses, but what's remarkable is how they focus on quality right from the start. They don't just create solutions and then try to make them good; they build them with quality in mind from the beginning. They tailor solutions to seamlessly integrate with your specific business needs, putting quality at the forefront of their development process.

Are there any areas for improvement or something A Dev could have done differently?

We've had a smooth collaboration with them up to this point, and no issues have cropped up.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Professional Event is an Educational company that implement 'Governmental continuous education for healthcare units' project. We have 3 platforms:

• Platform of Association of professional education for healthcare
• Educational platform for hosting webinars
• Educational platform with courses for healthcare specialists

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire A Dev, and what were your goals?

• All of our platforms were not reliable
• We were spending too much on supporting our on-premise servers
• We had all development of the platform in-house

SOLUTION

How did you select A Dev and what were the deciding factors?

We have selected A-Dev among of other competitors because of their good expertise in our field, skilled professionals in the team and also one of the most valuable factors was their result and business orientation.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We started working with A-Dev with supporting our existing platform, to stabilise its performance. That took approximately 2 month because of some of urgent functionality was requested by our customers, so the need to add it to the existing solution appeared.

After that, their engineers started full audit of our existing platforms in scope of their "Project innovation" period. The results were really interesting for us, so we have decided to move with that.

Starting from June 2020, team started working on completely new platform realisation and it took them 2 months to release first stable version. They delivered it 1 month earlier than estimated.

I really want to appreciate the level of motivation of the team, because they provided us with the best approaches to create solution for us. One of the most valuable points - they created cost-effective, scalable and reliable infrastructure using Microsoft Azure.

From August 2020 till now A-Dev still work on the modification of our platforms. During this time, they held 10 releases, 3 of them with business-critical functionality implementation and we are planning the roadmap of our platforms development for this year with more enhancements.

Technology stack is the following:

• Python
• VueJS
• MongoDB
• MS Azure
• Azure DevOps

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

7 people in total:

• 3 Developers
• 1 QA
• 1 PM
• 1 UI/UX
• 1 DevOps

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

As the result,

• feedback from our customers became 63% more positive than it was with old platform
• solution was fully migrated to the cloud, so that we got rid of our legacy on-premise servers
• Backend realisation was modernised and optimised so that we have 78% more in functional than it was on previous implementation
• During the implementation of new platforms, A-Dev created UI design so that our customers outlined in 96% of all cases it is more user-friendly than previous
• Thanks to A-Dev we reduced our in-house development by ~60%

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We have daily standups with the team and weekly check-up with PM on our targets and overall progress with the roadmap. We use Azure DevOps as the main collaboration tool (git repositories, Boards, and Build and Release pipelines for automation)

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They always take the task not only to do that, but to make it valuable for us. Their management try to deep-dive into the project as much as possible, and their engineers continuously learn domain-specific knowledge to make our product valuable and reliable.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

From our project perspective, I do not have anything for this point, we had no problems in collaboration with them so far.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I do DevOps for a recreational organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with A Dev?

We needed some frontend development done on our website.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They focused on frontend development. They designed a banner on the landing page that delivered our message with pictures and text. They also did some custom design.

The purpose of the site was to attract new members to participate in our sport. Previous events are listed, along with pictures. Classes are listed with information to help people learn about our sport. There is also a list of the current players on our team. There is also an events functionality, linking our page to the events on Facebook. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with two people.

How did you come to work with A Dev?

I’ve known one of the founders for a long time. I wanted to support them as a small business, and I liked the plan we discussed.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $2,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from October 2019–January 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their code is good. They work smoothly and efficiently. Prior to working with them, we had one class per week, and now there are three classes per week. Attendance increased by 200%. We are quite happy with the results we’ve seen.

How did A Dev perform from a project management standpoint?

Communication was on point. They worked in the Agile method and kept everything on track. We used Trello, Slack, and Telegram. They made things convenient for me to check progress.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their approach is mature, taking time and effort to deliver quality products on time. They accommodate the customer’s needs and ask questions. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Talk with them about your needs. They will direct you, help you gather your list of requirements, and determine the most effective strategies to achieve your goals.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Azure DevOps Engineer of IT Tech

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

IT Tech

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire A Dev to accomplish?

IT Tech

SOLUTION

How did you find A Dev?

• Online Search
• Clutch Site

Why did you select A Dev over others?

• High ratings
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from A Dev were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We are looking for an expert in Azure DevOps to sit down with our team and walk them through the build and deployment process over online sessions. This will cover multiple projects and will be going through the entire project from Building the image in Visual Studio to deploying it in Azure Kubernetes service and configuring the cloud environment to make sure that the application runs as expected.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Source Code

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They provided the working result on time.

What was your primary form of communication with A Dev?

In-Person Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Good communication

Are there any areas for improvement or something A Dev could have done differently?

Absolutely No. All aspects of the project were excellent.