Exlabs

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

ConnectD is the leading community network that connects entrepreneurs and startups with investors and NEDs to secure growth opportunities. Our innovative technology has helped over 1,000 organisations and individuals find each other through a data-driven approach and cutting out the middlemen in the investment cycle.

For investors and NEDs this means receiving relevant and strategic opportunities, and for startups this means being partnered with the best people that will help you to achieve your growth aspirations. I am the Chief Product Officer responsible for all things product.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We've found our technical estates were not in great shape - it caused difficulities scaling development operation under strict time constrains and limited resources. Modernising our solution and providing a more sustainable foundation for future growth was a goal to deliver for Exlabs.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were cooperating with Exlabs in the past with good results. That's why we have decided to go forward with talks with them to modernise our technical solution. Exlabs facilitated the process kick-off in the form of remote workshops. ConnectD & Exlabs representatives participated in a business rules mining exercise that helped to draw a more robust system flow.

It led to the delivery of a structured product backlog, first roadmap, budget estimation and priorities. We were happy with the workshops results & Exlabs idea of running the project - on that stage, we knew we were again a great fit for each other.

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

1) Kickoff Workshops - they neatly gathered our requirements and needs, designed the system flow, delivered a structured product log, first roadmap, budget estimation and priorities.

2) Architecture strategy - we jointly agreed on the final shape of application base and plans for technology & system advancement.

3) Agile Development - the work got sliced into two-week cycles (sprints), during the process Exlabs has been an owner of SDLC, whereas we coordinated prioritisation, product strategy and feedback gathering

4) Delivery - application was released after 10 months of active development & redesigned marketing pages communicated the change and new features to customers. Modernised modules inegrated well with legacy systems from day one.

5) We decided to continue cooperation with Exlabs to deliver new features and consult roadmap feasibility in a sprint-based model based on a proven working relationship."

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

About 10 roles in total including Solutions architect, Delivery Manager, engineering team, UX specialist, Quality Assurance analyst

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Really appreciated the conviction to persue domain driver design - while there were minor frustrations to start with, the increased longevity and agility is apparent.

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

It was very effective & flexible. We are very happy with the way Exlabs run the project. Communication via Slack and Google meet, back log management via Jira and confluence.

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

Great communication, transparency and understanding our business are the most valuable parts of our cooperation (putting aside Exlabs expert knowledge). Exlabs was a great partner for us, and cooperation was really harmonious.

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

We worked as partners, so where glitches or misalignments were identified, they were usually quickly addressed

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the COO of a B2B service startup. We provide a fully managed business continuity service, backed by a class-leading SaaS platform, which we have developed over the last 5 years with Exlabs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We hired Exlabs to take our initial proof of concept for TrackMyRisks and develop it into a fully cloud-based platform on AWS. The key goals were to develop a platform that would scale infinitely with little or no additional developer input.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were referred to Exlabs because of their technical excellence and also their ability to demonstrate a robust governance and compliance framework and development methodology.

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

The whole project ran to an agile framework, utilising both SCRUM and KANBAN methodologies. The platform was developed on an AWS serverless architecture, with a Vue front-end, S3 storage and Lambda modules to achieve a fully scalable platform. Exlabs looked after all UX/UI design, development and system administration as well as managing the total product development lifecycle, including sprint artifacts and release cycles.

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

The project team was flexible, according to the needs of the product development lifecycle, however, it included: an account manager, a project manager, a Scrum Master, a UX/UI designer, 3 front-end developers, 2 back-end developers, a sys admin and a technical director.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The platform now operates with over 7,000 accounts and we are extremely pleased with how it performs.

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

The project management was seamless, with the whole team working in Jira and Bitbucket, as well as communicating through Slack and Google Suite.

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

We have really enjoyed working with the whole Exlabs team because they have an excellent work ethic that dovetails seamlessly with ours. The most impressive was their technical knowledge of AWS cloud and serverless setup, configuration, and deployment.

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

It is genuinely difficult to find anything that we don't like about Exlabs - great people, fabulous service!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Learn Amp is the worlds leading learning suite, that incorporates LMS/LXP functionality, with performance management and community engagement. We "make work-life work better". I am the Chief Technology Officer responsible for all aspects of software delivery and product development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Exlabs?

Migration to public cloud (Amazon AWS) from Heroku, with minimal disruption of day-to-day running of our platform.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We have had a long standing relationship with Exlabs, as a highly trusted partner for software development. We had a high-level of trust that the project would be planned and executed well, with deep collaboration with our London based team.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Heroku was a great choice for us at the beginning of our life as a business, giving us a straight forward, zero-DevOps approach to hosting our platform. However, as we have scaled was wanted to move to a modern containerised architecture in the public cloud. This was a very big migration of our entire infrastructure, and had to be completed with absolute minimum of service disruption.

Exlabs provided great depth of knowledge and support in this area. Exlabs provided support with integrating our CI/CD pipeline, so that production builds push the new Docker image, and provision the new containers, for fully automated and reversible deployments.

Exlabs provided guidance and planning around migrating first our staging environment and testing every possible scenario, and then migrating our production systems in a careful, well planned and well communicated way.

Every step of the migration was planned and considered. We were able to bring the new environment live within our planned maintance window with zero problems, lost data or unforseen issues.

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

We worked with 3-4 experts from Exlabs Team. Work wasn split between Exlabs and Learn Amp teams, with overall governance from the Exlabs project owner, and oversight by Learn Amp CTO.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Zero downtime deployment - a great benefit of the move has been zero-downtime deployments. This is a huge win for us. Also, Background jobs "are flying" - job latency was a real problem for us on Heroku.

Now we have a new pipeline running on autoscaling EC2 spot instances, we are spending less on compute resource, but we are able to process far more jobs, far faster.

Exlabs provided guidance on selecting instances, and locking in reserved pricing. Our overall costs are down about 30%. Even though our monthly spend is lower, we have recorded a 30-50% improvement in our p50 and p95 response times.

Exlabs provided support on configuring Cloudwatch dashboards, and alerts. We now have far better visualisation of the health of the system.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective! Exlabs communicated very clearly at each step of the project. We were able to work in close collaboration throughout.

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

Their knowledge & expertise in cloud area is really impressive, but I must also emphasise their excellent work ethic and great communication during the whole process. Cooperation with Exlabs couldn't be more transparent & the support they gave us was really something really important for our company.

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

Nothing that we couldn't discuss during our cooperation.