Alpacked

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the co-founder and CTO of our company. We are the leader in multilingual cloud-based video meetings.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

We needed a trusted partner for planning, architecting, building, optimizing, and maintaining our cloud operations and infrastructure across multiple regions. As part of our requirements, we needed infrastructure resiliency, adherence to security standards, and optimized cloud cost.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I have been referred to them by a friend who used their services before and highly recommended them. I started with Alpacked with one person on a specific and well-defined project in early 2020. My team and I were impressed by the quality of the work they delivered as well as respecting the milestones and timeline. We subsequently expanded our engagement with them. As of today, they are a premiere and trusted partner of our Cloud Operations.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

They are currently an embedded team in our Cloud Operations. They are going through our entire workflow from inception to discussion, implementation, maintenance, and retrospective.

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

They are embedded into our operations, including a lead architect along with five permanent DevOps engineers and two rotational and on-demand base engineers.

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

There are many: Cloud migration, cloud architecture, cost optimization, Kubernetes orchestration, security implementation, and compliance certification, to name a few.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They are professionals with great communication skills. Since they are embedded into our workflow, our relationship is more of a team cohesion than external consultants.

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

The Alpacked team is professional, and they are good at what they do. They are mostly focused on AWS infrastructure and that's where most of our focus has been. However, at times, we needed additional support for hybrid cloud, security, or other things, and we were able to rely on them. They handpick their staff and train them well. In more than two years, they only had one staff who left, which is a very low turnover for high-tech companies.

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

I cannot think of any. They positioned themselves as AWS DevOps and don't claim skills they don't have, and they are very much that for us.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder and CTO of a video streaming startup. We have about 40 engineers on staff; we raised funding last year to launch our product in June 2022.

What challenge were you trying to address with Alpacked?

We had a gap in our DevOps capabilities, so we needed engineers to work with our developers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Alpacked is part of our team, and DevOps is their core responsibility. They provide a broad range of functions and services, including cloud services, software development, maintenance, and integration services related with AWS. Alpacked has worked with our six teams to address issues using our tools, and they’ve developed the software that we use to install our platform in the cloud.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $200,000–$250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in February 2022; we plan to continue with them for the foreseeable future.

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

They work on our product platform for customers, so they’ve been instrumental in scaling the platform by 300%. Overall, they’ve enabled us to onboard many customers.

How did Alpacked perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is good. We assign tickets to specific functional or integration tasks, and they’re responsible for executing them. Moreover, we have good communication. We use Google Meet and all the standard tools for project management. All in all, we’re happy with our relationship and their work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve done a remarkable job overall. The project is challenging; the team works long hours and weekends, even though they don’t have to. Nonetheless, they go out of their way to be accommodating and cooperative. They’ve helped us to scale the system, improve its reliability, and increase our performance. Overall, Alpacked’s team is skilled and experienced, so everything’s gone exceedingly well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t think there’s anything to improve; I have nothing bad to say about them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The best way to engage with them is to couple them with a highly-trained and highly-skilled team so they’re the most efficient.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Software Engineer at Refinable and point of contact working with Alpacked.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

Starting up our project, we set up all the infrastructure on our own. Not having that much previous experience with this, we got everything up and running with some gaps missing. Alpacked helped us with scaling, monitoring, service mesh and overal productionizing our kubernetes cluster.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We sought out to find a partner with experience in AWS and Pulumi such that our existing IaC could be extended and built upon. Alpacked checked those boxes.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We started with stating our needs and missing pieces of our infrastructure. We then worked together to find solutions and decide on steps to tackle them.

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

We had an account manager sitting in on our follow-up calls. And mostly worked with 2 Cloud consultants.

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

All the missing pieces of our infrastructure were tackled and in the end we were left with a production-ready scalable cluster which could be easily monitored.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We were in direct communication with the team on Slack and had bi-weekly follow-up calls. This process went smooth and they were readily available when we needed assistance.

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

They provided a lot of expertise, and even during difficult times, they were extremely professional.

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

No, the process went very smooth and we were happy with the deliverables.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the practice lead for tech platforms for a future of work consultancy.

What challenge were you trying to address with Alpacked?

We’d been working with an insurance client on their digital presence. In the last few years, they wound down one of their divisions in New York that had some of their data tools and AWS components. They needed us maintain and further develop a suite of applications for underwriters. We hired Alpacked to help with this project.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They help us work on serverless components on the full cloud stack around SageMaker and the React framework. The team worked with a lot of cloud-triggered, serverless applications that are built on AWS. We take care of the business logic but they write more of the code.

What is the team composition?

We work with 3–4 people from their team, including Volodymyr (Junior DevOps Engineer), Vladymyr (DevOps Engineer), and Yevhenii (Co-CEO).

How did you come to work with Alpacked?

We have some tools that crawl GitHub and look for teammates we might find interesting. Initially, we were only interested in Yevhenii based on work we found online. At the start, we weren’t sure how many backend engineers we’d need and began working with him. From there, Yevhenii brought on two of his teammates. We’ve been very pleased with the scope of our engagement with Alpacked.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $100,000–$250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2020, and our work is ongoing.

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

Every time that we’ve said something was important to us, Alpacked has gone the extra mile. The team is consistently talented. Sometimes, they’ll work overnight if they need to.

How did Alpacked perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is one of the few areas they could improve a bit. They haven’t really demonstrated project management to us. I know they have project management capabilities in-house but we don’t work with any of their project managers.

Generally, we hold a queue of work. Usually, I’ll queue up a bunch of work when I end my day and they’ll pick it up when they start theirs. Sometimes there are tasks that they could explore. If I don’t fill the hopper, those tasks don’t always get looked at. To be fair, we haven’t instructed them to color outside the lines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their professionalism and flexibility stand out. They’re not just an outsourcing partner; they’re specialists and experts. It feels like we’re dealing with fully formed people with personalities. We pay a premium for them and they deliver on that premium.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Aside from their project management, I have no complaints. We like working with them and plan to continue working with them at this level of engagement or greater.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Don’t treat them like an outsourcer. If you treat them like a partner, they’ll reciprocate that.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder and CEO of a SaaS technology company that has built a platform to assist all stakeholders in the daily operations of human clinical trials.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

We have built a highly scalable, cloud native, micro-services based platform that has many moving parts. We needed the expertise and experience of a dedicated DevOps company to setup our GCP platform and CI processes.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted a number of secure Kubernetes clusters setup for different services provided by our platform. We needed secure inter-service communications between clusters and wanted Istio service mesh at the core of the installation. All TLS certs should be provisioned by the platform and automatically upgraded when needed.

We also wanted a streamlined CI process where all code committed is automatically built and tested, and code pushed to a release repository is automatically deployed using Helm. Ultimately, our end goal was a very high degree of automation in order to reduce developer time on devops related tasks.

How did you select this vendor?

I researched companies in a number of countries that indicated they had the required skills and experience. I contacted 3 of these companies, Alpacked being one of them.

Alpacked demonstrated a number of things very quickly that made my choice of vendor very easy: - Skills and experience - Ability to start the project immediately and work to a tight deadline. - Competitive pricing, particularly for a startup company.

Describe the project in detail.

I was particularly pleased that I could hand over the devops project to the Alpacked team with minimal input from myself and just high-level requirements. Yevhenii and his team jumped right into our code on GitHub to determine the current state and make a plan to reach future state.

After the analysis phase, Yevhenii presented a detailed plan of action involving various steps to reach the end goal in milestones. This was very important because we were preparing our software for client demonstrations.

What was the team composition?

Yevhenii was my primary point of contact with another full-time developer. They also had 2 other developers working behind the scenes because the workload was significant and the timelines were short.

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

The resulting infrastructure is highly available and horizontally scalable. We have been able to successfully demonstrate scaling up and down the infra according to our load requirements.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We use Discord for internal collaboration and Github Issues and Projects for contextual tracking of work. Yevhenii and his team have been online and available at short notice throughout the progress of the project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was extremely happy with the depth of knowledge displayed by the Alpacked team. Our technology stack is varied and complex. They had no problems whatsoever in providing a HA environment for every part of our stack.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I am happy with all the work done and assets produced.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder of an online cannabis company. We provide information for cannabis growers. 

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

The website has been since 2016. It was built with node.js (express), Backbone.js, postgres, and redis for session management along with taskworker queues. I began a full re-write and wanted to streamline my developer process, since I previously been using just a simple shell script which would clone the repo, run migrations, and then restart the services.

It was very rudimentary, and given that I was planning to leave my full-time job at some point, I wanted a new reliable continuous integration that I could easily push to the repo, and it would deterministically deploy using Google Cloud. I wanted someone who I could throw all these tasks at, and they'd implement them.

What were your goals for this project?

Ability to locally cut a new patch and update my website through the following technologies:

Containerized on Kubernetes

• Google cloud build integration
• Auto-failover (with ingress integration)
• Cloudflare DNS/loadbalancer setup
• AWS lambda photo resizing setup with IAM policies
• Redis master:slave integration on GCP
• Postgresql setup on Google Cloud DB

How did you select this vendor?

I actually spent quite a bit of time looking for the exact vendor I needed because I am very particular of what I want. I can also smell if some vendors are blowing hot air and won't be able to figure out a solution when things get hairy. I checked their work history and when I messaged them, they were very responsive. Sorted by the total amount (in money) of projects on the platform, which I thought would help improve the signal along with reviews (stars) and actual review descriptions

Describe the project in detail.

Created a rough workflow diagram of how I'd like my updated automated build process to work which I initially posted with the job description. Alpacked had some verifying questions which allowed me to come up with a more concrete overview of how it'd look and what services I'd use. I wanted to be able to easily push updates to the codebase and have everything automatically update instead of ad-hoc updates.

I also wanted to be able to rollback quickly if necessary due to a bad code change, which I'm able to do by just reverting the commit, or looking back in time through the GCP console and taking an old snapshot and re-deploying it. It's my current dream setup and allows me to add more developers and have them come onboard rather quickly without having to worry about configuration.

What was the team composition?

Project manager initially arranged everything and then I was paired with Dmitriy who has been with me every step of the way.

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

I was able to speed up my development time at least 10 minutes and add a lot more features that I had been planning to implement, but didn't have the expertise to do so (as I'm an engineer and have less experience on systems).

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Async workflow due to timezone differences, however, if necessary, Alpacked is very accommodating in making arrangements to be online at a specific time if necessary. Otherwise, most work takes place from their end while I'm asleep, and is typically implemented in full by the time I wake up which is brilliant.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Initially, it was the amount experience during my research. They provided one on one help and a full breadth of knowledge, which we appreciated. Plus how reasonable turnaround times are when send new job specs over.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Only major area for improvement would be for them to hire more developers have the same skill set as the team currently has. I'm worried they will become so popular that their availability will drop due to high demand ;)

Please describe your company and your position there.

ByteStand is a set of magical tools designed by unicorns to make you richer, thinner and smarter. No, it’s not. ByteStand is actually a friendly software development company designed by ecommerce nerds who get excited about weird things like “cross platform integrations” and “fulfillment networks” and “coffee”. I am the founder of ByteStand and head ringmaster.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

We have a resource intensive application with thousands of users spread around the world. Before our project we were using 20+ droplets on Digital Ocean. It was expensive, unorganized and unreliable. We hired Alpacked to move us to Google cloud and Kubernetes. In order to save, time money and increase our ability to handle our growing customer base.

What were your goals for this project?

It was very straightforward. Our project was meant to save, time money and increase our ability to handle our growing customer base.

How did you select this vendor?

We had already worked with multiple other vendors to create our stack at Digital Ocean and being working with Kubernetes. They failed time and again. I found Alpacked thru an extensive research and interview process. We started with minor Devops work, which they excelled at. We then grew the project to move onto GCP and Kubernetes.

Describe the project in detail.

The basics of the project we're simple. Move us from Digital Ocean's 20+ droplets to Google cloud and Kubernetes. Maintain production during the crossover and ensure no down time.

What was the team composition?

Dmitriy was our single point of contact. Which is exactly what I required. I wasn't interested in managing multiple resources. Alpacked and Dmitriy accommodated my request and he was the only person I dealt with at Alpacked. Exactly as I requested.

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

We cut out cloud costs in half, our performance is exceptional, and we rarely if ever have the types of hardware issues we've had in the past. It has been a complete and total success on all fronts.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Extremely effective. We managed everything thru Slack and weekly conference calls. I never felt like there was a communication issue throughout the entire life of the project. And my requirements were always met.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I'm not sure how they did it, but we are in the US, and any time we had issues or questions they responded immediately. English was never an issue, and neither was the time difference. Not real sure when they sleep!

Are there any areas for improvement?

Can't think of any off the top of my head.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a high-tech company that operates in North America, UK and Israel. We provide software development solutions for Ed-Tech, Fin-Tech, Insur-tech and more. We also provide consulting.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

Alpacked assisted us with a number of high-skilled tasks with setting up AWS, migrating previous systems to AWS and setting up a completely new infrastructure that has helped us and our clients from small startups to medium-sized businesses.

What were your goals for this project?

To have a cost-effective, scalable solution that I could put my reputation behind. A system that I could trust would work. Alpacked delivered on all these points and were friendly to work with during the entire process.

How did you select this vendor?

I found Yevhenii via UpWork and after several dozen interviews and knowing the general industry landscape from previous work; I knew I found a service provider that I could count on for all my dev-ops needs.

Describe the project in detail.

The first task was to implement a continuous deployment solution to AWS services using Github GitActions as the team for the project was limited with resources and skillset. The system continued to grow due to the use of Github's subsystem modules.

This required further detailed work on AWS to make the system work. Alpacked also helped with setting up an End-to-End testing framework using Cypress that could be used on AWS with a number of different options. They were able to accomplish functionality requirements not publicly stated as ability from the frameworks we wanted to use. They found a way to make it work.

What was the team composition?

Yevhenii was my main point of contact, but I also worked with Ivan Oleg and Olha. All of them have excellent communication skills, great work ethic and generally friendly attitude. They were able to augment the project's in-house teams without any trouble at all.

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

The most apparent and vital KPI is that they finished the jobs on-time without extra cost and delivered production-ready results.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

There was no feeling that Yevhenii and project's in-house teams felt like outsiders or opposing force in culture or ego or any other issue that might arise from outside teams working with each other. For the 15 years I have been working in the industry, this was a welcome change.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Yevhenii cares about the success of his work and that his clients are pleased. As maybe a more personal note to this review: I had a video call for a particular task with Yevhenii where I told him that I was delighted with the results and that I would be interested in continuing our work together.

I saw him do a fist-pump and the expression on his face as he accomplished what he sought to do. I saw a bit of my self as a business owner pushing the company to excellence and growth. I have so much respect for him and his team.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing can be suggested at present.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO at an Ecommerce Development Agency headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our company has about 25 employees and we serve a wide range of B2C and B2B merchants on the Magento platform. In addition to my role as CEO, I provide solution architecture and technical consulting for our clients.

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

We engaged with Alpacked for Cloud Consulting, Architecting, Migration, System Administration and Support.

What were your goals for this project?

Our objective was--and continues to be--to provide our clients with high-quality DevOps services that will provide the necessary infrastructure and processes to effectively support their business.

How did you select this vendor?

With our clients' growing need for both cloud hosting and DevOps process improvements, we sought to find a strategic partner that could provide the level of service and expertise that we demand of ourselves.

After successfully complete a number of projects, we entered into a longer-term engagement with Alpacked.

Describe the project in detail.

Alpacked handles a multitude of DevOps services for our clients on a monthly retainer basis.

To date, Alpacked has managed the migration of over 10 client projects to the AWS cloud, as well as completed infrastructure audits and preformed optimization of existing cloud environments.

Alpacked also provides cloud architecting and consulting services to optimize Swarming and client DevOps processes. Alpacked currently provides services for more than 40 simultaneous cloud projects.

What was the team composition?

The team managing our ongoing engagement consists of a Technical Lead as well as two to three System Administrators and DevOps engineers.

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

Since engaging with Alpacked on a retainer contract basis the stability of our Magento environments has improved significantly.

By improving the cloud architecture for our hosting environments as well as modernization of our deployment processes, our clients experience less downtime and have an overall better service from our team.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication with Alpacked team members has been excellent and they always strive to accommodate our meeting and project schedules whenever possible.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We are consistently impressed by the deep technical knowledge and abilities of the Alpacked team. Their willingness to take on new challenges and be flexible with our clients' demands is always appreciated and has made them a strategic partner.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Given that a large portion of our team is spread across multiple time zones, communication is naturally more difficult, but we haven't found that to be an issue with Alpacked. Their team is generally very responsive despite the difference in working hours.

Please describe your company and your position there.

My company specializes in building software solutions for clinical trials. We conduct full lifecycle of product development, including specialized phases related to the domain. I am the founder and CEO

For what projects/services did your company hire Alpacked?

We hired Alpacked to help us create and implement system architecture for a distributed platform on AWS

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Domain expertise, prior experience in similar projects and reasonable price

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Cannot disclose project details

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

On the project we hired 2 senior DevOps and one mid level DevOps engineer

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

The project is still in progress. Phases so far were successful in terms of their deliverables

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It is easy to communicate with them. They are accessible, reasonable, and straightforward.

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

They are professional and on time with estimates

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

Being more proactive regarding pragmatic solutions which are simple and maintainable