Advascale

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a SaaS company developing a go-to-market scaling platform. I’m a co-founder and the chairman of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Advascale?

They helped us build our cloud infrastructure in AWS.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We needed to build an infrastructure that could handle massive scaling and would be extremely secure. Advascale built the cloud infrastructure our developers work with. Their CTO consulted us on getting the right setup in terms of Kubernetes clusters (a tool to help run applications), load balancers (to monitor server health), integrations with Spot.io (an optimization tool) for cost savings, and so on. They’ve been optimizing and supporting the setup along the way as well. We continue to engage and consult with them regarding our cloud setup.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with Elias (Co-Founder & CEO), Olga (Director of Operations), and their CTO, and we have a primary contact for the cloud setup.

How did you come to work with Advascale?

My co-founder researched different companies online. Advascale’s offer was exactly what we needed, and I believe that my co-founder had an initial discussion with Elias about their capabilities. They gave us a great offer, and we could see that Elias, Olga, and everyone else we engaged with were responsive, straight talkers, and extremely competent. They understood our challenge immediately.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost so far is in the $10,000–$20,000 range.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Advascale in August or September 2020.

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

We’ve had no downtime and no performance concerns. Whenever something comes up, they fix it. We were looking for competent people to put our infrastructure in place, and Advascale delivered.

How did Advascale perform from a project management standpoint?

They meet deadlines, they’re super responsive, and the communication is straightforward. All in all, it’s very easy to work with them. I’m in touch with their leadership over email, Teams, and Telegram.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Elias and his team are extremely knowledgeable and pragmatic. They know their stuff, and they’re very nice people.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing in particular that I could mention. They’re giving me what I need.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Be open and honest about their wishes while maintaining an open dialogue.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder of an emerging news website in the sport and leisure segment.

For what projects/services did your company hire Advascale, and what were your goals?

We want to prepare for future peaks of visitors and needed a robust platform for our website. The platform should be running on AWS services, autoscale itself regarding of the visitors count and take usage of a load balancer. After local development, changes in code should be easily deployed on a staging instance before pushing to production. We wanted a fast, reliable and robust web app, that is fitted for an increasing count of users and be ready for the future.

How did you select Advascale and what were the deciding factors?

We were in contact with several companies, but Advascale made the best impression, both in terms of their technical expertise and in a business sense.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Build a WordPress web app on AWS-based Ubuntu server, connecting to Redis and Elasticache, building a load balancer, building deployment procedures with Spot.io, Jenkins and Bitbucket. Moving existing website and domains to this platform.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

At the beginning with two engineers, when needed there were up to five engineers working on the project.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Very robust site, no downtimes and very fast. Deployment of needed code changes can tested very safely and brought up to production in a very easy way.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

After bringing up statement of work with us together, they are working very determined and fast. If they needed something to know, they communicated with us via Slack or Zoom. In the end they keep all timelines.

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

The team of Advascale is very skilled and equipped with high knowledge. If something went wrong, they quickly found a solution.

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

There is little room for improvement here. Sometimes the contact persons change, so you have to explain some things twice. But in the end, a high-quality solution always comes out!

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Vendigo, a finance broker. We built a platform that let's consumers apply for finance for home improvements, either directly or through a merchant, so it’s both a B2C and a B2B2C business.

What challenge were you trying to address with Advascale?

We needed someone to build our AWS infrastructure, including development, staging and production environments, setup Jenkins pipelines for CI / CD and generally provide DevOps services whenever it was needed.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They are essentially our DevOps team. We hired them to build the whole AWS infrastructure for us. It’s fully automated using Docker containers and auto-scaling, so there’s very little to no maintenance at all. They continue to work for us on retainer. Every week, they do tasks for us as required.

What was the team composition?

2-3 DevOps engineers as required.

How did you come to work with Advascale?

I have worked with them in the past on several projects at different companies. I'm impressed by the level of expertise that they have, as well as their commitment and response times.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent over $20,000 to date.

What is the status of this engagement?

The engagement is ongoing and first started in July 2018.

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

One thing I can tell you is we have almost zero issues. Everything is fully automated as we can literally launch environments with the press of a button.

How did Advascale perform from a project management standpoint?

I talk directly to the engineers, so the management happens on our end. They meet deadlines. We communicate via Slack most of the time and occasionally through Telegram.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I've been extremely happy with them over the years, which is why I keep using them. I give them five stars. They’re experts at what they do, they are always available and respond quickly, which is extremely rare to find. They are not expensive either, considering the above.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always room for improvement but I can’t say that there’s anything major they are lacking. One thing I could potentially suggest is they could contact me immediately when there’s a problem. They do that but essentially, new people that they hire tend to be a little afraid of approaching me directly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them as much information as possible. Be very open about what you want to do. If you have any deadline, explain the context around it; don’t just give them a date. Explain why there is a deadline and why it’s important. From a technology perspective, try to give as much information as possible.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Tech Lead and Product owner at Systems Engineering

For what projects/services did your company hire Advascale?

Set up CI/CD, Stage, Demo, and Production environments using scalable, real-time cloud-based AWS services involving Docker, Ruby, NodeJS, Python, and several different database technologies.

What were your goals for this project?

Fast, reliable, robust, and redundant web services that allow serving very large data structures to the users.

How did you select Advascale?

We had several companies interview for the task, but Advascale seemed like the most robust, knowledgable and skilled company.

Describe the project in detail.

We had a two-day workshop where we discussed the initial setup in detail. Afteward the project has continued to elvolve, and Advascale has continued to deliver solutions for these new challenges.

What was the team composition?

We started with a single engineer, and for a while now we have been running a smaller team of four engineers.

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

So far we have managed to build a robust and secure production solution that solves actual problems for actual people.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We talk daily as needed on slack. This works well and simply.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They have proven very adaptive as business needs within our company changed.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There have been a few challenges with ensuring stability and continuity in the CI/CD environment, but we have always been able to formulare an dexecute a plan and resolve the problems.