Advascale

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.