Palark

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CTO of an advertising & marketing company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Provides market research data by recruiting and surveying millions of consumers worldwide through proprietary panels and survey apps

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Infrastructure audit and stabilization
• Preparing the infrastructure to handle 5x traffic load
• Reducing time to market
• 24/7 infrastructure monitoring with rapid incident response

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
• Company values aligned
• Real expertise rather than just business success stories

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.

The project began with clear infrastructure challenges: we did not have enough internal capacity to monitor all parts of the cluster, consistently track load and latency, or apply the right best practices across the environment. The work was delivered in several stages:

1. Kubernetes infrastructure audit and review of findings. Palark performed a detailed audit and presented the results in a practical, straightforward way. They did not give vague technical recommendations — they highlighted specific issues, explained why they mattered, described their impact, and proposed clear ways to fix them.
2. Remediation plan and migration. Palark quickly prepared a remediation plan, deployed a new environment, and carried out a step-by-step migration to it. The migration was completed smoothly, without downtime or service degradation.
3. Ongoing support and improvement. After the migration, Palark continued to support and improve the Kubernetes infrastructure. The main issues identified during the audit were resolved early, and the environment has continued to evolve in a stable way, with new components addressing real needs without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Key deliverables:

• Full infrastructure audit with concrete findings
• Clear remediation plan
• Deployment of a new infrastructure environment
• Zero-downtime migration
• Ongoing 24/7 support, monitoring, and infrastructure improvements 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Improved Kubernetes infrastructure stability and reliability
• Successful migration to a new environment without downtime or service degradation
• Better visibility into cluster health, load, and latency
• Faster response to incidents through 24/7 monitoring
• Reduced operational risk by fixing critical issues identified during the audit
• Infrastructure is better prepared to handle 5x traffic growth
• Improved delivery speed and shorter time to market

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

Their project management was clear, structured, and highly responsive. Deliverables were completed on time, communication was straightforward, and the team was quick to react when priorities changed or new needs came up. What stood out most was their ability to combine strong technical execution with flexibility: they were proactive, transparent about progress, and focused on solving real problems rather than just following a formal process.

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?

What impressed us most was how integrated they became with our team. Communication was completely open, all engineers were available in Slack, and they never felt like an external vendor. They worked as a true extension of our team — approachable, involved, and always ready to jump into discussions, answer questions, and help move tasks forward.

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

One area for improvement would be having a dedicated DBA team or a stronger DBA service offering. Palark were transparent about this from the beginning and openly stated that they do not provide DBA as a Service, so we had to cover that part separately with other specialists.

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.

A specialized Payment Service Provider focusing exclusively on making account and wallet payment methods perform as measurable revenue drivers. We help global merchants process all major account and wallet payment methods in Europe by offering a single API and centralized settlement, thereby simplifying access and enhancing the performance of these next-generation payment methods.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Improve and streamline our Infrastructure-as-Code assets by refactoring a large Terraform repository, extending the Terraform infrastructure to support multiple environments, including production, and deploying them in AWS

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Money 20/20

Why did you select Palark over others?

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.

• Perform initial IT infrastructure audit and provide written recommendations.
• Transform a Terraform repository into a clean, best-practice-driven IaC
  codebase.
• Extend the Terraform infrastructure to support multiple environments, including
  production, enabling consistent and repeatable provisioning across all stages.
• Implement and deploy several brand-new environments in AWS using the improved
  Terraform.
• Implement monitoring for new and existing AWS environments.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Spinning up new environments became a straightforward task, rather than a headache for a
couple of weeks of engineering time. The IaC repository is now easy to understand and extend.

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

Transparent estimates and progress reports since day one. Delivery was mostly on time; if
unexpected delays arose, we were promptly informed and provided specific reasons.

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?

They're easy to work with and responsive to feedback.

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

-

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CIO of Maestra

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Maestra is an all-in-one personalization platform for DTC brands that helps personalize beyond email & SMS to drive +15% conversions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Ongoing SRE support for the existing Kubernetes clusters.
• Devops consulting on the proposed new architecture and infrastructure evolution.

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Referral

Why did you select Palark over others?

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

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.

The work covered a mix of planned engineering tasks and SRE support for the Kubernetes-based platform. The scope was focused on cluster reliability, platform operations, monitoring, networking, access management, and architecture advisory.

Key deliverables completed during the period included:

Support and stabilization of the Kubernetes cluster operations across multiple environments.
Investigation and remediation of node update failures.
Troubleshooting and mitigation of Prometheus, Grafana, kubelet, target availability, disk, memory, and etcd-related issues.
Support for networking changes, including Cilium-related design and troubleshooting, BGP work, and migration planning from Flannel to Cilium.
Resolution of VPA-related issues and rollback support after platform-impacting changes.
Advisory work on architecture for a new site, future OS/platform choices, and infrastructure evolution.
Cluster hardening and operational cleanup, including disabling unnecessary modules/exporters and addressing outdated module configurations.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Kubernetes SLAs expectations are met, reaction times SLAs are met.

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

All communications is in Slack backed by ticketing system. Reaction times are instant for the incidents and <1 days for routine tasks.

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 offers great Kubernetes understanding and a mature support process. 

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

All good.

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

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CEO of an information technology company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Incident Management SaaS

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Manage the cloud infrastructure of some production services

SOLUTION

How did you find Palark?

Referral

Why did you select Palark over others?

Referred to me

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

• Palark helped us migrating our production services from one cloud provider to another
• Increased the security and reliability by implementing good DevOps practices
• Helping us improve on redundancy

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• More reliable services and greatly decreased downtime & incidents
• Multi-region and multi-cloud environments enabling compliance and governance for our customers

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

• They deliver on time and are very responsive

What was your primary form of communication with Palark?

Virtual Meeting

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

The technical knowledge of their team and organization

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

Sometimes it feels like they could benefit from better documented processes and playbooks so the reactions from their different team members can be more consistent

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