IT Svit

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Yuriy. I'm a CTO at Silverstream company. We manufacture and sell products for traveling and tourism.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

IT Svit is responsible for support and maintenance of our servers, troubleshooting and any new implementations. We have on-premise data center along with OVH.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed someone to monitor and resolve any upcoming issues with our servers. As we didn't have an internal expertise to do that ourselves.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I worked with IT Svit at my previous company and had very positive experience with them. So when the question about infrastructure management came up in Silverstream, I reached out to IT Svit for help.

Describe the project in detail.

IT Svit investigated our current infrastructure and server set up, then came up with custom SLA and detailed plan for support. After we agreed upon terms, we connected with IT Svit software tool to keep track of tickets and reports. I'm keeping close communication with their project manager to stay updated.

What was the team composition?

From IT Svit's side there were System administration team lead (responsible for all the technical side), technical writer (created a technical documentation) and project manager (responsible for the communication).

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We've got much more stable infrastructure after IT Svit took over the administration. We don't have to worry about outage or any crushes. This is especially important for us during the high demand season or during promotions.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Workflow was quite smooth. During the project I kept close communication with IT Svit's PM and received regular reports.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

IT Svit impressed us with their proactive attitude and quick response time, even during non-working hours.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I think that every company has a room for improvement in both business and technical side.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a project manager of a company that uses emerging tech to manufacture smart roofs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

As our team began to grow very fast and we were able to engage in multiple projects at once, our system admins were not able to deploy all the required environments timely. We tried to use AWS features, but it was very costly because of several mistakes we made, as we lacked the appropriate experience.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to optimize our existing AWS infrastructure, automate the software development processes and use our cloud investments most cost-efficiently.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We were searching for best practices of DevOps workflow implementation and found a pretty decent description of this strategy in an article on Hackernoon, published by IT Svit CEO, Vladimir Fedak. We contacted them and they showed an in-depth understanding of the challenges we faced and offered solutions for them at once.

Describe the project in detail.

We needed someone to configure the AWS pipeline for CI/CD features. We needed our Terraform and Kubernetes deployments automated, as well as configuring continuous monitoring for our environments. They handled the full scope of the tasks we needed to be done. They automated the server provisioning for all of our projects and enabled us to monitor them through smart alerting using ELK stack, Prometheus & Grafana or AWS CloudWatch.

What was the team composition?

We worked with a System administrator and DevOps engineer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our infrastructure is now managed and deployed automatically, using Terraform and Kubernetes. We have an in-depth understanding of the system performance at any time due to the smart monitoring system they designed and implemented. I would say the project was a complete success.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

IT Svit has ample experience with IT outsourcing services, and we knew it firsthand. They quickly established communication channels between our teams in Slack and on Skype, and their specialists were always in touch with us. They had many solutions ready for any issue we came across, so we were able to deal with every challenge quite efficiently.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They did not promise anything supreme. They just delivered the services we needed, on time and at affordable prices. Most importantly, their experience helped them foresee most of the issues and solve them proactively, instead of dealing with the consequences.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I really cannot think of anything.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Vladimir, I am Product Owner @MKE company. We are engaged in the new equipment development (including equipment for severe operating conditions) its production, complex projects, engineering, maintenance in operation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

We required a team of professionals to automate setup procedure, remove bugs and errors in deployment flow, using Ansible, Terraform and AWS services such as Lambda, AWS Rekognition.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals was to resolve issues with our legacy code and infrastructure. And prepare to the next phase (Q1 2020) which is migration of all our services to the cloud.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We wanted to find a team of professionals in Ukraine. One of our colleagues worked with IT Svit previously and recommended them. Shortly after a couple of calls, we decided to go with them.

Describe the project in detail.

IT Svit provided DevOps engineers and helped us do the following:

• Create Terraform manifests for IaaC
• Write Ansible scripts to automate the deployment process
• Create different deployment procedures for different application configurations
• Create developer documentation on deployment process and technical points

What was the team composition?

We worked with a Team Lead and 2 DevOps engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

After our infrastructure began to operate based on Terraform manifests, we experienced a significant boost in the efficiency of operations, and automating the deployment helped a lot.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their Team Lead is very proficient with AWS, Terraform and Jenkins, he was able to grasp the core idea of the project at once and offered working solutions from the get-go. It could not have worked better. We communicated regularly in Slack, so we were always abreast of the project progress.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their technical knowledge is profound, and they are able to come up with working solutions very quickly.

Are there any areas for improvement?

While they were able to form a sufficient team and meet all our project goals so far, the Team Lead is not always available as the team carries out multiple projects at once. They could definitely grow a little more.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Olga, I am the Head of People Operations at AGRO Holding (Ukraine and U.K)

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

We had to move to AWS from our dedicated server infrastructure due to scaling up our operations. We wanted to make use of Amazon features and web services like Amazon Pipeline and other open-source tools. We also needed help with dockerizing our applications.

What were your goals for this project?

- Audit of our existing infrastructure and workflows - Building cloud-native AWS pipeline for our projects - Moving our workloads, data and applications to AWS - Tutoring our team on using Terraform, Kubernetes and Docker containers

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We tried to find a DevOps specialist in-house but had no success for nearly 3 months. We did not want to work with AWS support engineers or promoted partners to avoid vendor lock-in. So, we decided to find a reliable IT services agency providing DevOps services with lots of positive customer reviews. This is how we found IT Svit on Clutch and after a technical call with their Team Lead we were sure they are able to deliver the results we needed, so we signed a contract.

Describe the project in detail.

We started the contract in August 2019 and as of the end of September we have the following results: - They assessed our infrastructure and software development processes and designed a full replica of our system using AWS and open-source cloud-native analogs. - They moved our data and applications to the cloud and performed a seamless migration so that our team experienced no interruptions in work. - IT Svit produced detailed developer documentation on the architecture of our AWS infrastructure and tutorials on using it. They were also very helpful in explaining some particular details to our developers. Now IT Svit provides ongoing maintenance and monitoring of our AWS infrastructure.

What was the team composition?

IT Svit provided us with DevOps engineer, System administrator and Project manager. It was important for us to keep a transparent communication during the project so IT Svit suggested assigning Project Manager Vladimir which turned out great.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our new software ecosystem is cost-efficient, works flawlessly and helped us speed up the development of our projects significantly. We would not be able to achieve the same results on our own.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They were very attentive to our requirements and offered the most suitable solutions for every case. Their PM and Team Lead were very attentive and precise on what they were doing and why, so we were informed of the project progress at all times.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

IT Svit clearly knows how to make AWS tick. They had ready solutions for nearly all the challenges we encountered.

Are there any areas for improvement?

It turns out they do not have the same level of efficiency with managing Google Cloud or MS Azure. But I am sure they will improve in that area with more successful projects.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Denis, I am the CTO at an Amsterdam-based startup. Our product allows checking any website pages for errors and creating comparisons after the release in just a few clicks and provides simple reports with explanations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

We secured the next round of funding and began to grow. Our project evolution demanded us to find some Big Data/ML/AI expertise and we had to ensure stable product performance.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to ensure that Quokka was accessible under heavy workloads, which meant going for the cloud scalability. We also wanted to implement Big Data/ AI/ ML algorithms instead of basic scripts we had at that moment, to ensure the system works better the more it is used.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We googled for Big Data/ML/AI expertise and found multiple references, so we had to select the best fit based on some customer feedback or reputable rating. IT Svit had a great record history at Clutch, so they made it to our shortlist. After a technical call, we were impressed with their in-depth understanding of all the challenges and the obvious technical expertise, so we signed a contract.

Describe the project in detail.

We wanted our site to be deployed at AWS and use AWS CloudFront as CDN and AWS ML/AI services and Amazon RDS for back-end operations. However, IT Svit has calculated some expense projections and showcased that a bespoke Big Data solution would be more cost-efficient.

The main benefits they proposed were the significant decrease in false-positive error reports due to the correct ML model training, as well as the ability to launch testing in several browser-test instances simultaneously due to running them as Dockerized microservices atop a Kubernetes cluster.

IT Svit team has built a simple and elegant AWS infrastructure, using Amazon EC2 instances, S3 storage, Kubernetes cluster and Docker test-instances, PostgreSQL as the main database and Amazon RDS for scalability. Instead of using AWS AI/ML services, they deployed and trained a bespoke AI algorithm in Python, which checked the website snapshots before and after the release and highlighted the differences and errors.

What was the team composition?

2 Python developers, one of which was a Team Lead and 1 DevOps engineer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are now able to process thousands of requests at any given second while securely keeping snapshot collections for each user separately. The partnership with IT Svit allowed us to achieve all the goals we wanted and the team provides an ongoing platform improvement.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

As one of our Python developers also was a Team Lead, he was able to delegate the tasks and report on the progress fluently. He showed an in-depth understanding of what is best for our project and his suggestions helped avoid several potential issues in time. We had regular Skype calls and he was always in touch in chat.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They did not boast and did not promise any wonders. They simply delivered what we needed, executed it flawlessly, on time and under budget. There were no cases where they walked the extra mile for us — but I am sure they would have done it, should the need arise.

Are there any areas for improvement?

English is not their native language, nor is it mine, but we were able to communicate and discuss all project-related questions with ease. A little more language fluency would definitely not hurt them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Dmitry, I am the CEO/Founder @ HireUkraine. We provide CRM/HRM/ job portal development. Our main product is a job portal for IT specialists that provides full anonymity of recruitment to ensure the safety of mind for all the parties involved. This platform is quite successful on Ukrainian market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

When we launched our product, the infrastructure with one server cluster was appropriate, but as the numbers of users grew, it became obvious that we needed more scalability. We had to move the infrastructure and workflows to the cloud and ensure the operations were reliable, scalable and easily assessed.

What were your goals for this project?

We required a cloud transition to AWS from our legacy servers, site reliability engineering (SRE) services to build a scalable system, cloud monitoring solution design and implementation and CI/CD implementation for ongoing platform development.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We browsed the web and searched for teams with appropriate skills and positive customer reviews. IT Svit has a great standing on Clutch, which helped them make it to our shortlist, along with some other teams from Ukraine. However, during the technical call they showed an in-depth understanding of the project requirements and possible complications, and explained the ways they would overcome these challenges. Deep technical expertise combined with confidence and professionalism sold them to us, and their convenient time zone was very important to us, as well as cultural fit and a possibility to meet in person should the need be.

Describe the project in detail.

We had to assess the current infrastructure and product development process, and find the ways to improve it or redesign it correctly from scratch. Then IT Svit team had to build the appropriate cloud infrastructure and move our workloads to AWS. Finally, they had to configure security, monitoring and smart alerting of our production environments, as well as building continuous integration and delivery workflows for our ongoing platform development.

What was the team composition?

The SRE architect analyzed the pattern of our workloads and came up with a plan to build scalable infrastructure that best suited our needs. With the help of 2 other DevOps engineers, he built a cloud Kubernetes cluster using AWS Load balancer and auto-scaling groups, hidden behind a bastion host. After that they installed and configured a monitoring/alerting system based on ELK stack and Sumologic, with automated alerting to Slack. This made their work transparent to us, as we are able to monitor their operations unobtrusively. Lastly, they configured Docker/Jenkins/ Gitlab CI/ Ansible pipeline that greatly reduced the time and effort required to deliver new product features for our developers, and helped us on some occasions, when our internal team lacked the needed skills.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

IT Svit team completed all the project tasks on time and now provide ongoing 8*5 support during the business hours, both for the production environment and for new feature development. They are so cost-efficient that we plan to increase our collaboration and hire them as an outsourcing software development provider for our next project. This will help us consolidate our internal resources and grow our main product quicker.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their Project Manager Vladimir was always in touch and reported twice a week on the project progress. They dealt with all the tasks on time and were always very clear on what they are doing and why.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They do what they promise, they do it on time. They will walk the extra mile if needed, which saves lots of time and money in the long run. They have proactively solved several issues, which could have resulted in major problems, should they have been left unaddressed.

Are there any areas for improvement?

They have incredible technical expertise, but it is not backed up by certifications. Should they have been AWS-certified, we would spend less time discussing their suggestions and would have shortened the migration period even further. This is not critical, however, as they have proven to be quite dependable in all things cloud-related.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Konstantin, CTO @ Spaceport company. We are a software developer and IT services provider from Ukraine.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

We are mostly providing MVP development and were primarily deploying our projects to Google Cloud platform due to the capabilities of the Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine. However, when one of our customers decided to continue the partnership with us and wanted to move the product to AWS in order to use CloudFront and Amazon Aurora, we had to get the cloud consulting and design a GCP to AWS migration.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to rebuild our software development, testing and deployment routines to utilize AWS cloud components instead of Google App Engine tools. This had to be done with as little interference with our workflows as possible.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We were choosing between 5 IT service companies in Ukraine and found lots of positive IT Svit reviews on Clutch, which helped us to decide to contact the team. They showed an in-depth understanding of all underwater reefs and potential challenges of GCP to AWS migration during the technical call and asked questions that led us to make several decisions that saved us a ton of money in the long run.

Describe the project in detail.

We had to reconfigure the workflows that were built to use Google Cloud Platform services like GKE, Google BigQuery, Google App Engine. Instead, we needed to build CI/CD pipelines using open-source tools like Terraform, Kubernetes and Docker and AWS-specific tools like Amazon Pipeline. This had to be done smoothly in order not to disrupt the ongoing work on other processes, but quite fast to meet the customer’s deadlines.

What was the team composition?

We worked with 2 DevOps engineers and 2 Python developers, who provided infrastructure design and database architecture implementation.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have moved from GCP to AWS in quite a short time without stopping our normal operations. The transition was executed flawlessly and helped us reduce time-to-market for this project by 40%. In addition, using VPC peering to combine the resources of several accounts helped us save around 50% on infrastructure costs for this customer.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their PM and Team Lead were very informative and constructive, they always came up with the best solutions for every step and frankly reported on all the challenges. We were in touch through regular Skype and Zoom calls and via Slack, so we always had our hands on the pulse of the project progress.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They did not pose themselves as super-professionals or unique specialists. They just showed their professionalism through their actions and delivered on their promises. All the tasks were done on time, which is quite rare for IT outsourcing — and we did not have to fix any issues, so they clearly know what they are doing.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I cannot recall a single reason to complain.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Alex. Principal Banker at Inspiring Development. Inspiring development is a specialist management consulting company for banks and microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in developing countries and emerging markets.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire IT Svit?

In one of the projects, we required a reliable 24/7 server support under SLA for our server infrastructure, as well as a consultation on a possible cloud migration from our metal servers.

We were also looking for a trustworthy software development team for consulting, design and implementation of an internal CRM for our sales and customer support departments.

What were your goals for this project?

To improve the overall IT infrastructure performance as well as to develop our business using integrated tools for clients aqcuisition.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Our colleagues, who are long-term IT customers, recommended them to us.

Describe the project in detail.

IT Svit performed several tasks for us:

• Infrastructure security audit and improvement
• Set up monitoring and notifications using Prometheus, Grafana, and AlertManager
• Automation of backup and restoration procedure

What was the team composition?

We worked with a Cloud Architect, one Develops engineer and a Support team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are certain that our servers and data are in reliable hands. We have established communication and IT Svit solves all incidents in a very fast manner.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective and supportive. No further comments.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are very responsive, skilled and very proactive at identifying the issues and offering the solutions for them.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As in any company around the world. They have to work on improving their internal processes on the daily basis, to ensure they remain as efficient and customer-oriented in the future as they are now.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering for an analytics company. We gather, integrate, and run machine learning on analytics data to provide insights for social, web, and advertisement campaigns.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with IT Svit?

We needed help gathering a large volume of data, processing it quickly, and making it quarriable. We have a lot of real-time data coming in, and we needed to figure out a way to quarry it as soon as possible so we could run a machine learning algorithm and build an infrastructure to support it.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

IT Svit provides us with DevOps services. Our engagement is staff augmentation to a degree. They set up and continuously monitor our infrastructure so they can fix any issues and support our needs.

The team deploys any new pieces of infrastructure we need. The system runs on AWS, and They maintain Apache Druid so it can run faster and handle many smaller database tasks.

What is the team composition? 

We work with an account manager and another resource who implements the actual work.

How did you come to work with IT Svit?

Our CEO introduced us. After we were satisfied with the month trial period, we continued working with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2018, and the work is ongoing.
 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

When the team started, we were running Mesos. They deployed and helped move all our apps to Kubernetes, which improved our internal infrastructure. Setting up Spinnaker helped us manage the largest components of our infrastructure.

Managing the scaling process used to be quite painful, but the new system they set up makes it much easier and more robust. If a node goes down, it gets restored automatically. We haven’t experienced any issues with Apache Druid or Kafka so far.

How did IT Svit perform from a project management standpoint?

Once IT Svit commits to a task, we know it will be taken care of. They deliver what they promise and never forget about anything.
We hold calls twice a week to discuss what we’ve accomplished and what needs to happen next.

What did you find most impressive about them?

IT Svit is a solid team. I have full confidence in them. Sometimes, they even completed work sooner than we expected. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

They correct any problems we bring up to them. We had minor issues initially, but they’ve solved them all since.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you need help with infrastructure, IT Svit is the right team to hire.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of MICE Portal, a B2B marketplace for events.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with IT Svit?

We had a longstanding project plan to migrate our hosting infrastructure. After the engineer on our staff with the requisite expertise left our company, we needed to outsource the project.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project is structured in two phases. Phase one, which involves moving our existing infrastructure over to the new hosting platform, is nearly complete. The hosting aspect is for both our production and staging systems.

As part of the staging system, IT Svit built new capabilities for testing features that we didn’t have in our previous setup. Phase two will be spent implementing a monitoring system tailored to fit within the hosting platform.

What is the team composition? 

One full-time engineer from IT Svit does most of the work for our project. We work with two other people, including the CTO who does most of the conceptual, strategic planning. He provides high-level guidance to the engineers who perform individual tasks.

How did you come to work with IT Svit?

We spoke to three different providers. After we explained the project, we had each of them come back to us with an estimate and a project proposal. We chose IT Svit because their company was more of a structured organization than the other freelancers and agencies we considered. They had the expertise we were looking for as well as ability to provide us with replacements if necessary.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $15,000-$20,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2019, and the project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The work IT Svit provides for us is very much behind the scenes. Since their deliverable is not yet in use, it’s hard to give concrete results. Once complete, we anticipate that having a platform to roll out changes will improve our developers’ productivity and reduce their workload. The platform will also improve our system’s testability and offer better observability for software in production. 

Historically, we’ve been unable to test various aspects of our software outside of production. With the migration, part of the goal was to extend the area within our system that we can actually test before we roll out changes. 

Lastly, IT Svit is helping us consolidate our hosting infrastructure. Replacing the two hosting providers we use with a single one will reduce expenses for our company. After compensating IT Svit, we’re looking at a payback period of about 18 months for the ROI. Their work will continue to save us money in the future.

How did IT Svit perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management has been average. We use the agile methodology.  Every week, we set up two calls to go through specific planning. Our teams are in constant contact throughout the project. We share a Slack channel to communicate. 

I felt like we had different understandings on both sides about how quickly we needed to proceed to get to the end result. We’re about a month behind where we would have expected to be. However, we gave them additional requirements after our initial discussions which expanded the scope. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The CTO is very knowledgeable. He was quick to pick up the specifics of our platform and what we wanted to achieve. They transformed the instructions we gave them into an actionable plan for the engineers to implement.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could have a more detailed estimation process for the scoping of the project. I would like to know more clearly how long the project will take.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend getting the CTO involved in your project. If you have more complicated requirements, spend some extra time on making them clear.