EZOps Cloud

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CTO of an information technology company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Prosple exists to make sure all students have equal access to the best career advice and opportunities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Replicate our entire infrastructure in a new set of AWS accounts
• Improve our existing CICD pipelines towards Terraform best practices

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

Upwork

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We engaged EZOps to replicate our entire AWS infrastructure for both Production and Non Production. This included the AWS services and our CICD pipelines.

They also managed to, as part of the process, standardise our setup in Terraform and improve our CICD pipelines to be much more readable and maintainable (using Terraform) while maintaing the same DX for the engineering team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The quality of the work was good and so far no issues have happened. The team was good to work with and had a good communication process with regular updates on Slack and weekly touch points via Zoom.

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

We managed to deliver the project on time and almost within budget (a bit over but within acceptable parameters given the complexity).

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

Email or Messaging App

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

We found the Upwork agency model interesting and contrary to previous experiences in Upwork they made this feel like we hired a standard devops agency.

The team seem to genuinely care about the success of the project.

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

At times, we felt the technical leadership from EZOps side was less present than we expected. We had to compensate with our own tech leadership.

This was communicated to EZOps and the issue was promptly addressed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the Founder & CEO of a software company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

All-in-one enablement platform that aligns your sales, marketing, customer success and growth teams to drive repeatable revenue growth.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Build and maintain Production Pipeline in AWS

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

Online Search

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We needed to build a blue/green deployment pipeline for our production environment. Challenge was building this while our customers were in the platform. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Team has successfully deplivered on our project goals. Pipeline works well. Team went above and beyond to support us when we needed it. They are knowledgable, responsive and easy to work with. 

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

They delivered on time, mostly. Intially there were issues due to resource sharing. But once we pointed out the issues, their CEO made sure to have DevOps fix our isssues on a holiday. 

Project management always finds resources when we need. Production pipeline maintenace is super time critical work. I could not have asked for more when it comes to support.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

Email or Messaging App

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

We're impressed by their integrity and transparency. It matches with our company value.

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

It would be easier to have the same person work on our project - who has in-depth knowledge on what has been done. But, they handled develoer transitions well.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director, Software Development of an advertising & marketing company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a search marketing agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Move application from single server to cloud environment
• Configure auto-scaling for the application
• Put everything into an automated deployment solution

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

• Online Search
• Upwork

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

The project consisted of several items which were scoped out by EZOps. 

• Setup an AWS environment for our application. This environment has several AWS services, including ECS, ELB, VPC, Elasticache, AuroraDB, and more. 
• Containerize our Application for use in Docker. 
• Setup a deployment configuration that runs when we push code to Github using several AWS services like CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CloudFormation, etc. 
• Move our current DNS setup from Lightsail to AWS Route 53 and move the application with little to no downtime. 
• Setup monitoring and alerts using CloudWatch to ensure our environment runs properly.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our original problem was that our application was not scalable. Our work queues would fill up and the application could not service more requests. The measurable outcome of this was to have our application field requests without filling up and scale out as needed.

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

The communication through Slack was excellent. I was provided a daily digest of work to be done and work done. Anything that needed my attention was immediately brought up, and a discussion through Slack was always helpful and timely. Likewise, I was able to raise any issue or question I had and an answer was always provided right away.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

Email or Messaging App

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

The excellent communication and the knowledge of the staff were impressive.

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

The beginning of the project was a little hectic. There seemed to be a lot of people on the project, though that eventually came down to a core group of 2 or 3.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of an energy manager software provider.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We develop white-label energy management software for enterprise scale clients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Stabilize DevOps environments
• Provide turnkey environment optimization services
• Assist with security practices

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

• Online Search
• Other

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables:

• Building and maintaining new features and functionality. 
• Building and maintaining automated tests for calculations 
• Customizing the platform for partners. 
• Communicating with engineering leadership about requirements. 
• Experience and understanding working with OOP and MVC systems. 
• Experience in web application development and/or have Saas experience

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have high reliability of multiple cloud environments and are able to satisfy our service level agreements with clients of 99.9% uptime. We have several APIs with internal AI/data science services that are integrated with VPN and cloud computing services. We now operate multiple engineering environments with data centers in multiple countries and have robust code deployment processes across all of them. We have maintained best security practices while expanding our operations.

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

Project management has been simple - we use messaging platforms for daily communication and weekly video calls for detailed progress updates. Tasks are assigned weekly and completed on-time as expected. They have also been available for off-hour deployment schedules and emergencies. Overall, they are extremely responsive and reliable.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The quality of work is very high, and onboarding for projects has been easy. Over several years of working together, they have always delivered and communication throughout complex engineering projects has been top-notch. At this point, they act and feel as though they are members of our internal team.

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

Improvement is always possible - nothing specific to mention. :)

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of the company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Our company is a technology company that provides SaaS-based solutions to K12 school districts.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Automate our infrastructure
• Containerize our workload
• Increase the resilience of our infrastructure
• Implement devops for our organization

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

Online Search

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Implement devops as part of our IT operations 

• move from elastic beanstalk and manually managed services to infrastructure as code and automated managed services 
• move from elastic beanstalk to containerized workloads 
• implement continuous integration and continuous deployment 
• provide infrastructure reviews and audits 
• provide security reviews and audits 
• provide AWS cloud implementation expertise

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Automated our infrastructure, which allowed us to begin making iterative improvements. 
• Lowered our cloud costs by more than 30% 
• Implemented all of our infrastructure as code - creating a very resilient infrastructure
• Provides direct support to the development team - developers and DevOps work together when implementing solutions. 
• Provides disaster recovery and monitoring services.
• Provides AWS cloud consulting services for when we implement new services.

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

Project management is smooth and transparent. EZOps uses a kanban-like approach where all the work is visible. They are incredibly responsive in support of emergencies, which happen rarely.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I'm continually amazed at the level of support we receive despite being a smaller customer. They always go above and beyond to help us. They are an extremely valued partner in our business.

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

None that I can think of. We have very honest conversations about how we both can improve process and they work to make improvements when opportunities for improvement are identified.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of a software company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Provider of custom-built financial services solutions based in the cloud.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Automate Build Pipeline deployment to AWS
• Build Terraform to automate application environment
• Migrate Application to ECS

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

upwork.com

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Good value for cost
• Speed to response

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We hired EZOps to help take our elastic beanstalk and amplify application stack and move it to a more traditional ECS and S3/Cloudfront deployment.  The scope of work involved building new build/CI actions to publish to a new environment as well as building the environment from scratch using Terraform.  This including buildout of ECR, ECS, SES, SQS, VPC, EC2, ELB, and many more 3 letter acronyms in order to get our application stood up end to end.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Output was really our main measure of success.  The goal was to see the applicaiton rebuilt and functioning in a new environment without issue.  EZOps worked in my source control, so I was able to see partial builds.  They PR'ed work to me in order to let me guide progress and adjust.

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

EZOps included a project manager on my project.  They worked within my project management tools.  They also provided updates via our joined slack channel on a daily basis.  This was very helpful.  I had near immediate responses for any questions via slack.  Very nice!

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

Email or Messaging App

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

We have a lot of specific requirements and strive for perfection.  EZOps Cloud went the extra mile to make sure that all of our needs were met 100%.  Other companies would deliver a canned solutions, but EZOps delivered something custom written molded to exactly what we needed.

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

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CEO of a software company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Business in a box for digital agencies

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Deploy our project to AWS

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

Upwork

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

High ratings

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Deplpyed our local app to AWS

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They deployed our local app to AWS

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

On time

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

Virtual Meeting

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

They have a nice and responsive team

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

Nope

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Owner of an education company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We provide exam prep content for medical students

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Take over custom website development project abandoned by previous developer

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

Upwork

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• Good value for cost
• Interviewed team

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

I tasked them with finishing a custom developed website and deploying on AWS

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Successful deployment and integration with payment processor

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

Communication and expectations were always very good. They met all anticipated deadlines and were very responsive.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Communication and developer competence was better than I had experienced with other dev companies.

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

No. Perhaps expand their team to include web designers too.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Growment

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Gong consulting partner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire EZOps Cloud to accomplish?

• Resolve AWS configuration issue
• Move files
• Document business processes

SOLUTION

How did you find EZOps Cloud?

• Online Search

Why did you select EZOps Cloud over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from EZOps Cloud were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We had an complicated policy/ permission issue related to a cross account AWS bucket that we could figure out. We have about 4k files in a bucket, 1,500 of which we could download/ access, which was impacting an important project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Able to access our files.

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

Yes they were very responsive. We had a Slack channel going. They were responsive to emails. They grabbed an extra person while on a Zoom to give input. Very collaborative.

What was your primary form of communication with EZOps Cloud?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Fast response with the right answers.

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

No.