Palark

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive at Sweedpos

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Sweed is a technology company offering an all-in-one retail operating platform for the cannabis industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Reliable Kubernetes-based production environment.
• Easy-to-use software release and delivery system.
• Adopting our software for Kubernetes.
• Service fault-tolerance.

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Personal recommendation / referral

Why did you select Palark over others?

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

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Being a startup, we desperately needed numerous technologies and best practices to run our SaaS successfully, yet we lacked in-house engineers and core competency for these tasks. We had Kubernetes running but it was not production-grade to fulfil market expectations. Our apps needed refactoring to run in Kubernetes efficiently and reliably. Our developers could not release software updates in numerous environments quickly.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to launch the Kubernetes-based production for our SaaS and it proved to be reliable. We got a backup cluster that can be used in case our main cloud provider’s region becomes unavailable. Our main application has become cloud-native, and software updates are now promptly deployed to all required customers with a one-click button.

The efficient CI/CD introduced by Palark enabled us to significantly increase the development team size. Palark also assisted in passing our SOC 2 certification by implementing the required security tasks.

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

The pace and quality of the DevOps tasks rendered by Palark were perfectly aligned with our business needs and overall growth. For example, our software in production was ready to meet the customers’ demand, our CI/CD was ready for a growing developers team, etc. Our ongoing communication with Palark in Slack and via regular video calls helped us to stay on the same page and be fully informed regarding our current tasks, their actual status and future plans

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

We were impressed by a holistic approach to all our DevOps and operations-related challenges. Palark helped us on various levels — from software design to delivering and operating apps — with professional and practical guidance to succeed.

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

While we’ve been using Microsoft SQL Server in our apps, we needed specialized DBA assistance for those matters, which turned out to be out of Palark's scope. If they had offered such a service, we could benefit from it, too.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of G-Plans

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

G-Plans is a health technology company providing its users with customized nutrition plans online.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Building reliable infrastructure that is ready to grow and withstand high peak loads.
• Reducing time to market.
• Providing guaranteed day-and-night support for all business-critical endpoints.
• Helping developers to master new tools and consult them with leveraging technologies used in the infrastructure and CI/CD.

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Online Search

Why did you select Palark over others?

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

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

We wanted to develop and deploy applications in different independent environments with minimal effort. Containerization revolutionized the way we work. It allowed us both to deliver features much faster and for our team to scale quickly. In tight cooperation with Palark engineers, we also built auto-testing pipelines for frontends and backends, drastically optimized how our applications are built, and significantly improved observability.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

With Palark, we found a reliable technology partner who has built modern and fault-tolerant infrastructure and provides 24/7 support for our services. It helps our tech team to tackle the high load and increase our time-to-market while we can focus on business development. The tools, processes, and best practices we got with Palark helped us succeed in our specific market niche.

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

The Palark team covers our needs in both maintenance and further enhancements, delivering everything we expected on time. Urgent attention is given to the first issues to prevent any incidents and ensure our developers can carry out their work. Planned tasks are then utilized to address the latter. Based on their expertise, Palark presents a plan for our next DevOps steps during our weekly meetings.

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Palark possesses profound expertise in Kubernetes and Cloud-native technologies, enabling them to effectively address any questions or concerns we and our developers may have. We appreciate their professional, proactive, and supportive approach to project management.

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

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Engineering of Loona

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Loóna is a unique mixture of color therapy, sound ambiance, and storytelling that helps people disconnect from the world and get in the right mood for sleep.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Make a leap from production running on EC2 instances to full-fledged Kubernetes cluster.
• Improve CI/CD deploy process: add transparent and deterministic partial rollout, and add quick rollback procedures.
• Get better ops metrics
• Less developer overhead on release and configuration management

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select Palark over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

We had a basic Docker-based development environment for our digital product and needed everything to run it in production. To achieve this, the Palark team deployed a fault-tolerant Kubernetes cluster and ran our application there. They implemented all essentials, such as monitoring and backups, to keep it running smoothly. Our developers got a fully automated and convenient CI/CD pipeline to deploy all changes to production easily and fast.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

1.  Production environment implemented in time 
2. Zero-downtime software deployments 
3. Predictable software updates deployment time 
4. Guaranteed SLA for any incidents 
5. Both infrastructure- and application-level observability

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

We created a migration plan together with the Palark team. They helped us to migrate our application to run inside the Kubernetes cluster. The process was transparent and straightforward. All issues were addressed urgently to prevent any incidents and let our developers do their work. During the weekly meetings Palark provided details on Devops progress and gave insight on the next steps for the devops issues we were facing.

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

1. Palark possesses extensive expertise in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, enabling them to effectively address any inquiries or concerns that we and our developers may have. 
2. Palark's project management was thorough and comprehensive. We appreciate their professional, proactive, and supportive approach.

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

No

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of engineering at a marine fuels delivery company. We provide a truly independent, reliable, and global service for digital delivery across all marine fuels.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Palark?

We needed help with provisioning and maintaining our platform infrastructure. We also needed SRE capabilities and 24/7 support.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Palark has migrated all our Azure infrastructure from a previous company into our own Azure cloud. They’re responsible for all SRE capabilities of our own Azure cloud. This includes maintenance, implementation of new infrastructure, helping us stay ISO 270001 certified, and cloud cost optimization.

Palark also focuses on the use of new Azure resources, ISO 270001 compliance, monitoring, observability, alerts, database creation, and SLA requirements.

What is the team composition?

We work with around 10 teammates from Palark.

How did you come to work with Palark?

We found Palark through a referral. The referral was very positive, the price was right, they were based in Europe, and they made a very good impression when we had our initial meetings.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2024, and the project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since working with Palark, our platform has been much faster and more stable than when we had to handle SRE and infrastructure ourselves. We’ve also been able to release new features faster.

How did Palark perform from a project management standpoint?

Palark’s project management is very professional and transparent. They deliver on time and respond well to our needs. We have weekly status meetings to show progress, and they communicate very well via Slack and Google Meet.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Palark has very detailed knowledge about Kubernetes, Azure, Grafana, and other Infrastructure as Code capabilities.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything for them to improve.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder of a marketing company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Marketing/analytics tools.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Bring our production services back to operations by recovering broken virtual machines and the database.
• Improve existing monitoring capabilities and establish best observability. practices
• Maintaining the infrastructure with a focus on better reliability.
• Migrate applications from VMs to containers.

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Conference/Exhibition

Why did you select Palark over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Our server and network infrastructure were audited thoroughly to record their initial state, with
further practical steps to fix existing issues and enhance the availability, reliability, and
observability. The Palark team also maintains our virtualization solution based on bare-metal
servers, supports and streamlines CI/CD pipelines. It carried out the containerization for our
applications and services to enhance the developer and operations experience, as well as
ensured the reliability of business applications.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Palark assisted us with the product launch by auditing, optimizing and maintaining the server
infrastructure. They restored our archived servers, configured new hypervisors and virtual
machines, fixed numerous issues in our MySQL database, and significantly enhanced both
infrastructure and application monitoring. Additionally, thanks to the application containerization,
our development team became much more efficient in delivering the software product to the
market.

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

Palark jumped right in and really engaged with us, tackling our biggest issues quickly. The
weekly meetings have made it easier to see what’s going on and work more efficiently on our
infrastructure. With Palark’s tools and processes, we can communicate easily and sort out
urgent problems fast, plus we got solid technical advice whenever we need it.

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The Palark team actively proposes and implements the best DevOps and infrastructure reliability practices, taking full responsibility for everything on the server/backend side. This approach allows us to focus on product development, giving Palark the ability to maintain and improve the infrastructure.

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

Nope

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Engineering of

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

A developer toolkit for building fast, interactive customer-facing analytics directly into your product

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Act as our DevOps & Infrastructure team

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

• Online Search
• Other

Why did you select Palark over others?

Pricing fit our budget

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

Palark helped us to establish our application infrastructure.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Palark set up our infrastrucute in AWS and has acted as a external DevOps team since day one.

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

Palark project management is very good. We have a weekly alignment call where we define goals for next week and Palark team communicates proactively on progress and roadblocks. 

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I am really impressed by their communication style, transparency and level of ownership. Although being an external team (vendor) they always act with total ownership and proactively provide suggestions and improvements which has led to cost saving and increased uptime of our services.

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

Nothing to mention here

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Cielo Finance

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Cielo offers onchain activity feed and wallet tracker for various blockchain platforms.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• Migrate ClickHouse and MongoDB from managed services to another cloud provider and self-managed setup with no data loss or downtime.
• Ensure reliability for production databases and Kubernetes.
• Implement autoscaling and improve performance for critical services.
• Operate and continuously improve cloud infrastructure, letting the dev team focus on the product.

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Referral

Why did you select Palark over others?

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

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Reliable operation, high scalability, and first-class performance of various database solutions and Kubernetes are fundamental for our business-critical applications to run smoothly.

This required not only implementing and optimizing the relevant architecture and configurations of interconnected services but also ensuring robust monitoring and ongoing 24/7 support.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

First of all, migrating a loaded MongoDB cluster from one cloud provider to another was a huge and vitally important effort for us, complicated by significant technical constraints. The success of this migration benefited us in many ways: performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency.

Palark also introduced or elaborated on other Open Source-based database services and messaging platforms according to our requirements, as well as efficient autoscaling that is able to survive any traffic peaks. These enhancements enabled us to ensure services availability and deliver new features and services resulting in a market advantage.

Last but not least, having 24/7 support is helpful for sleeping well and being sure your business  is running like clockwork.

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

We’ve been impressed to see our major issues effectively resolved during the first months of our collaboration already. From planning our tasks to completing them and consulting in between, the entire communication and workflow is easy and convenient, thanks to a project manager and well-established processes on the Palark side.

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Palark engineers are constantly involved and responsive to our needs. It doesn’t take long to get advice on architecture and discuss what can improve our product from an infrastructure point of view. 

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

Since our business and software are very dynamic, it would be awesome to further improve the observability system by adding more specific and customizable dashboards that are easy to use for our developers whenever they need to add new metrics, peculiar views, etc.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am a team lead at monite

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Offer invoicing, bill pay, B2B payments and cash flow analytics to your business clients. Customize using API building blocks

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Palark to accomplish?

• e2e infrastructure management
• knowledge sharing

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

• Other

Why did you select Palark over others?

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

How many teammates from Palark were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

To bring our digital product into production, Palark swiftly established multiple fault-tolerant Kubernetes clusters across various regions, hosting our application. They skillfully integrated crucial components such as monitoring and backups to ensure uninterrupted performance.

In addition, our developers gained access to a seamless and automated CI/CD pipeline accompanied by a customized release manager tailored to meet the specific needs of Monite GmbH, empowering them to effortlessly and rapidly deploy all modifications to the production environment

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

1. 5 mins SLA on reaction time - 24x7
2. Infrastructure- and application-level observability
3. Zero-downtime software deployments
4. High level of involvement in our development process and close cooperation.
5. Optimization of Cloud costs

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

Quick responses, clear workflow processes - at Monite, we independently prioritize our tasks, and the Palark's team promptly reacts to reflect our priorities in their weekly sprints dedicated to our projec

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

• 24x7 support with 5 mins on reaction
• A team of interchangeable DevOps engineers + project manager at the price of 1 engineer

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

no