Mission Cloud

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a marketing technology company, providing promotional online platforms for brands and agencies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mission?

We have around 20 servers hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Until recently, we had a single IT technician who managed our servers for over a decade. However, we got to the point where we needed continuous support to monitor our servers 24/7.

Furthermore, we needed to upgrade our servers to implement additional features and keep up with Amazon’s latest products and services. As a result, we started to look for companies that were up to speed with all of the AWS changes. We wanted resources proficient in AWS who could manage our servers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we brought them onboard to manage our production servers. However, after talking to their team, we quickly realized that our servers were too outdated to handle our desired features. We also wanted to implement auto-scaling, which we had never had before.

They helped us develop a plan to upgrade our servers into a new environment. Their suggestions included separating our servers by database type (SQL and Mongo) and a more streamlined configuration.They also advised us on differentiating our general-purpose servers. Some servers needed more processing power and others needed more memory. 

They helped us select the proper models to accommodate our needs. They actually approached Amazon on our behalf to apply for a program, in which Amazon partially covers the cost of the transition. Currently, they continue to manage our servers

What is the team composition?

They assigned a dedicated project manager who served as our main point of contact. She would set up the meetings with the support staff who execute our tasks. Occasionally, the VP of technology would join our meetings as well as their SQL database expert. At each meeting, 4–5 people would attend based on our agenda and needs.

How did you come to work with Mission ?

We interviewed three companies before selecting Mission. Besides their budget-friendly pricing, their marketing rep responded promptly to our emails and made sure to follow up with us. We also spoke with their president who noted our specific needs, objectives, and expectations. Not to mention, as Amazon-approved AWS partners, they were always informed about the latest updates and best practices.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve paid $3,000 a month for Mission’s services in addition to the AWS fees.

What is the status of this engagement?

Their work began in January 2018 and is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their insights have been essential to increasing efficiency and saving money. Not only did they point out that it cost us more to support our old models than to upgrade, but they proactively found a cost-effective way to transition our servers. The new servers specifically target our needs and have more processing power.

In terms of server management, they’ve proven themselves to be alert and on top of things. There have been times when they noticed issues with our servers that we missed and immediately contacted us. If something unusual happens, they write a ticket in our system within minutes, which has been a great peace of mind for our development staff. It’s one less thing for us to worry about.

How did Mission perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re always available to meet with us, and they communicate well. We’ve had frequent meetings with their team to address any questions and make sure we’re on the same page. We also use a ticketing system and can adjust the priority to manage tasks.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Since I haven’t worked with other service providers aside from our previous IT supporter, I can’t compare them to other vendors. However, I’ve been pleased with Mission’s performance so far. They’re responsive, reacting to issues in mere minutes, and they provide knowledgeable advice.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

No, not at the moment.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO for a biotech company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mission?

We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting a very data-intensive application. The administration of AWS got to be more than we wanted to handle, so we were looking for a company that offers AWS professional services to lessen the load on us internally.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They use Glacier and S3 to manage our storage needs, which can be pretty intense. Our business unit that uses AWS most intensively deals with analytics, statistics, and big data. Also, we regularly bring applications up and down because we can save money by bringing them down when we're not using them. Mission handles bringing up the applications when we need them, managing them when they're in production, and then taking them offline when we're not using them.

What is the team composition?

We have one project lead, Ryan [director, Mission], and he manages a team.

How did you come to work with Mission?

We started with an online search and were really looking at 2–3 companies. We found their pricing to be very competitive and liked their focus on AWS, so we decided to sign a master service agreement with them.

How much have you invested with them?

Our monthly bill is around $10,000–$12,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We signed the master services agreement with them in July 2016 and it's an ongoing relationship. We started with just one project to see how they’d perform and have been increasing the amount of work with them over the past year.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

If we didn't outsource the AWS management to Mission, I probably would’ve had to hire 1–2 additional people. By keeping our internal hires down, they've kept my costs down.

How did Mission perform from a project management standpoint?

It’s really nice that we consistently deal with the same person. We have regular meetings with the project manager and techs from our side and Ryan and his team. They’re also very proactive about scheduling meetings if they don't understand a requirement. I’ve never had to call them to find out what's going on because they’re always on the ball.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Some larger companies have a different person talk to you every time you call so you end up spending 15 minutes getting them up to speed. Mission is small enough so that doesn't happen but they're large enough to get the job done. We get a consistent service that we can rely on. It's all about the service and they provide a good service.

Another thing they do very well is the invoice and billing service. Mission includes the invoice from AWS and sends it to me as part of their invoice. I only get one invoice now, which might sound like a small thing but it's really helpful. I also get a discount by billing through them. Their invoices are very detailed and have all the line-items laid out. I've never had to call them to question any charge because it's easy to read and to understand.

Are there any areas they could improve?

As Amazon is expanding and coming out with new offerings, it would be great if Mission could give us an idea of other things that we could be doing to add value or possibly save us money. I don't always understand what the offerings are or how they could potentially increase value or bring our expenses down. One of the reasons we use them is because we don't have the time or resources to research the options on our own.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mission?

We have a small team and not a lot of DevOps expertise. We’ve been growing and scaling while using Amazon Web Services [AWS] for all our server and database capabilities. Because we didn’t have those skills within our own organization, we decided to utilize an external company for this purpose.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Beyond scaling, much of their effort comes down to rightsizing. In effect, we’ve been able not only to scale but also to save money with Mission. They’ve implemented a process by which we can use more cost-effective instant sizes for what we need within AWS.

I don’t know how many developers were assigned to the project. I had personal interaction with one of their DevOps people. The scope was to take our current AWS infrastructure and rebuild it from the ground up on servers controlled by the Chef script, which allowed us to redeploy and reconfigure servers quickly, efficiently, and reproducibly. Mission also put in place appropriate cloud-formation scripts within AWS, which launch and maintain instances and will actually scale them appropriately as demand fluctuates and we need more or less capacity.

Mission also performed a full review of all our security groups, ports, and permissions to make sure that everything that needed to be was properly closed and that the ports which needed to be available were limited in their availability. Mission implemented appropriate VPCs [virtual private clouds] and separated our development and production environments. They did some database optimization—not so much at the query level, but in terms of sizing, disk space, and type.

Since then, Mission has been monitoring our system. There have been a few occasions when they reached out to us, letting us know that something would be scaled up or down because of the recorded usage. In effect, Mission has become our DevOps team.

How did you come to work with Mission?

We found them under some problematic circumstances. We had experienced a service outage on our platform, and the dev team couldn’t pinpoint the cause. It had been going on for 6 hours, and we had exhausted our limitations of creative know-how and things to look for. We reached out to a couple of support firms to see if there was anyone available who could jump on and help us out. Mission answered the call immediately. Their president told us that they weren’t a last-minute support company but that they would be happy to help. Through some troubleshooting and trial-and-error, along with Mission’s ability to reference error logs better than our own team, they helped us pinpoint the problem and resolve it. We were so pleased with their ability to pull together a team and help us that we decided to set up a maintenance agreement. We’ve since done a bunch of work with Mission.

How much have you invested with Mission?

The work done for rebuilding our platform with all the right componentry had a rough cost of $20,000. We have a monthly maintenance agreement with Mission for around $3,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Mission around 8 months ago. It’s an ongoing collaboration. They are our service provider.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I can’t think of anything quantitative to mention, but the platform is up and running. We’ve had no outages or problems since engaging Mission. I would say that we’ve reduced the cost of our AWS usage by more than $3,000, which is what we’re paying Mission. In effect, we’re getting them for free.

How did Mission perform from a project management standpoint?

They use a ticket-tracking system through JIRA. We did put some spreadsheets in place upfront while planning the work, but the primary tracking has been done through the portal. Mission has been good at keeping us up-to-date. Beyond JIRA, I’ve been able to reach out to their engineer directly at odd hours of the day, and he’s been very responsive in maintaining communication.

What did you find most impressive about Mission?

I can’t say that I have other points for comparison since I haven’t used another firm like Mission. When we initially had the outage problem, we reached out to similar companies. Those companies were not at all willing to assist unless we wrote them a check. We had a problem which needed to be solved and were happy to pay for it, but the focus was on the issue itself, not on working out contractual agreements. Mission took the approach of jumping on and helping us in order to earn our business. Within 30 minutes of reaching out to them, we were on a call with 4 or 5 engineers from Mission’s team and gave them access to various parts of our network. They cumulatively dug through logs and helped us out. Their responsiveness and willingness to help someone who wasn’t yet a customer was amazing. This is something I can compare to other companies that turned me down or gave me an uncomfortable feeling.

Are there any areas Mission could improve?

Their bills are a bit messy at times. Mission is a reseller of Amazon services, so not only are we in a managed services contract, we’re also buying AWS from them. In some cases, it’s a bit difficult to follow the details of the bill, and I’ve run into challenges when trying to validate it against the Amazon logs. It was never completely wrong, but there is a misalignment. This issue is also a result of how Amazon does its bookkeeping and tracking for resellers. In general, I have nothing but good things to say about Mission. I haven’t had any problems with their staff or the work itself. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a camera manufacturer that makes digital cinema cameras. I am the director of web.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mission?

We were moving from internal hosting to the cloud, and we needed a partner. We chose Mission to help us with this.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The migration is complete. At this point, we’re working on optimizations and new functionality. With their help, we’ve recently implemented the ELK stack, which is Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana; they manage it on a monthly basis as well. They only work on AWS-related [Amazon Web Services] projects right now.

How did you come to work with Mission?

I’ve been with the company for about three years, and we’ve had Mission for longer than that. I imagine it was based on location, expertise, and cost, but I don’t have the details.

How much have you invested with Mission?

We spend between $10,000 and $20,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

They started working with the company before I was hired, and our relationship is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

They have a team in Eastern Europe, so we have good coverage. The middle of the night is sometimes the best time for us to do things, and that’s never a problem with them. They’re very responsive and knowledgeable about what they do.

How did Mission perform from a project management standpoint?

The sales executive we have now is a bit junior. I asked her a question about our bill, and it took a couple weeks to get it resolved, which is kind of slow. The project management is more collaborative.

What did you find most impressive about Mission?

When we speak to them, we are speaking to the principals of the company. We hear from the president or lead people, so I would say they value our business from that perspective.

Are there any areas Mission could improve?

They could be more proactive in making recommendations. We pay them a lot of money every month to do this, but they don’t make recommendations unless we ask. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the director of physical marketing for an animation studio.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mission?

We wanted to move our hosting infrastructure from the internal IT department, which had been working on it on an ad-hoc basis, and onto a managed services platform. We wanted an expert in the field to take responsibility for our configuration.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Mission has performed a number of services for us. We’ve had a collaborative effort, but Mission had the most responsibility for kicking off our migration. Our team has grown over time. When we started, I had one primary contact, but I have come to work with an account manager, various technical people, as well as Mission’s owner.

How did you come to work with Mission?

The internal IT department sourced Mission for us. They went through a due diligence process, where I did not have a direct responsibility in decision-making.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Mission 2 ½ years ago. We have an ongoing relationship.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

From a response standpoint, the number one thing I’ve looked for in a vendor is the ability to never make me think about the fact that a particular project is taking place. Mission has 100% achieved that goal. I have full confidence in the fact that Mission is delivering the website professionally and to scale. They are proactive in reaching out to us when something is deteriorating in our performance and in communicating their recommendations. I’ve never had to chase Mission in order to get information.

How did Mission perform from a project management standpoint?

I have no complaints at all. Mission is able to communicate goals in both a planned and ad hoc perspective, which is important. I feel completely informed.

What did you find most impressive about Mission?

They’re good communicators. They understand that there are varying levels of comprehension on the client’s end. Fortunately, I am a very technical person so I can comprehend a lot of what Mission is saying. They are able to communicate challenges effectively, using clear language, without getting lost in esoteric problems.

Are there any areas Mission could improve?

Our needs are not extremely hard, so I don’t have any criticisms for Mission.