CORE 24/7

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'am Project Manager at alabs.team. We have extensive experience in developing complicated highload products based on agile principles for public, telecom & fintech companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

Our company turned to the Core 24/7 team to perform infrastructure and k8s cluster deployment operations, preparation of the Ci/CD, transference of the project to the cluster with subsequent provision of technical support services.

SOLUTION

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

We chosed this vendor based in their past project and technical skills.

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

The Core 24/7 team completed the tasks of design and implementing the infrastructure. The k8s HA cluster was deployed, Ci/Cd was prepared, also a monitoring and alerting system has also been implemented. Now the Core 24/7 team provides technical support services.

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

We work directly with an account manager, but there are about 3 developers supporting behind the scenes.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The support of the "CORE 24/7" saved our team 10 hours per week of maintenance work, which allows us to focus on other tasks.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It's easy to communicate with their account manager and devops. We typically contact with Telegram, and they use Jira to manage tickets. If there any issue they response quickly.

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

They offered high-level support at an affordable price. Their team often suggests alternative solutions to technical challenges.

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

It took a while for them to get used to our task evaluation, but they eventually got up to speed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm CEO and co-founder of a IT Product Company, we specialize in Data Management platforms.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

Our goal was to create a stable high load infrastructure with several Data Layers, with opportunity to fastly up new staging environment and deploy in out clients servers.

SOLUTION

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

The company has good reputation in our local market. We decide to work with them after interviewing several local and near abroad companies. The company had an impressive portfolio. They were the only company who provided our needed service for an excellent price.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

Firstly, they audited and interviewed us to find out our goal. Then, they provided three different solution in IaaS. One of them has been implemented for us.

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

CTO was directly involved in the audit. Two DevOps Engineers implemented a solution.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Deploy time in a new servers and creating new environment decreased for a twice.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We built an effective working process, everyone involved in the project can know statuses and open questions.

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

Customer Centricity. 

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

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Managing Director in charge of IT, Cybersecurity and PMO in an insurance company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

We needed a workforce to run, manage and deploy our company's server infrastructure and corporate networks.

SOLUTION

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

I have previously worked with Core24/7's CEO who IS an outstanding DevOps engineer. He has managed to collect a team of experts whom we hired at a competetive price.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

We are a newly re-established financial organization who left its parent company and now is on its own. While under the parent we were fully supplied in terms of IT services and infrastructure. So the toughest challenge was to keep the company fully operating during the transition period and afterwards. It's rather difficult to staff permanent workers with required skills in short time, so we decided to outstaff the services. Core24/7 walked us through from setting up our corporate LANs and firing up servers to day-to-day infastructure maintenance.

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

Their CEO was the main contact point from the start, but on a daily basis we work with 2 to 3 system engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The transition went smoothly taking into account how tough the task was. We switched services one by one according to the schedule which took us about 6 months. During this time we established a data center with critically important servers, set up corporate network, office telephony. During the transition there was not a single day of business stoppage, which is crucial for a financial organization such as we.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We have set up an inter-team chat in a messaging application integrated with an issue tracking system. This helps to quickly resolve issues.

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

They are ready to provide qualified experts, which is more cost-effective than having them staffed permanently.

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

A better understanding of customer needs from some of the engineers would be nice.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Software Engineering TeamLead

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7, and what were your goals?

Our goal was to implement and launch high loaded remote banking application with minimum downtime.

SOLUTION

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

We have known about CORE24 and had knowledge on their ideal reputation in customer relationship and DecOpsing experience. Those factors were key reasons in choosing the company.

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

Altyn-i is first and only at the moment digital bank with totally remote servicing. Big number of customers using RBO nowadays. Indeed, cloud infrastructure configured by CORE24 team upon k8s, openshift, gitlab-CI and number of other tools helped us to reach our goal.

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

Not sure about position names, but CORE24 provided us 3-4 high motivated and well skilled professionals from their team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Due to high responsibility and low response time of CORE24 team, the cloud infrastructures (for different environments such as test, stage, prod) were launched in short time, which definitely was one of key need of project overall success.

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

CORE24 was providing 24/7 service. We had been communicating in different platforms such as slack, whatsapp, telegram, email. And in all of them response time was very well.

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

The team doesn't know the word "impossible" in their professional lexicon.

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

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Currently I'm director of information system development department at BANK RBK (Kazakhstan)

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

We hired CORE 24/7 for building and automatization of CI/CD pipelines in our ecosystems such as internet banking

SOLUTION

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

We made small research around local IT-companies. The portfolio and the internal staff of the company were main reasons of choice

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

The main pipeline were mixture of agile and waterflow development. First stage was deep analysis of our eco-system in order to learn and understand specificality of banking environment and processes. I would like to admit in this section, that CORE 24/7 very flexible company. They provided unique solution that fits our demands.

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

Their CTO was always in touch with our team. Also CI/CD senior admins were evolved in to project

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Before this project our deploy was like a nightmare. Everything were hand work. Now our deployment with auto tests (depends on build) requires only 3-5 minutes

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The team was worked professionally in almost any case. Even at not planned work , or if we had a problems at night, The CORE 24/7 team was always up. The response time is very good, I would say beyond the average time on local market

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

I was impressed with the stability of the solution and their high-quality support.

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

They could try to learn more systems such as BPM's.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm senior developer in Sberbank Kazakshtan which is one of the largest banks in kazakhstan

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7, and what were your goals?

We had a problem with implementing CI/CD for one of our systems (FICO which is based on Outsystems solution) that had a closed proprietary core and had no support in any modern CI/CD systems. We needed create a CI/CD process to allow a more frequent integration releases with other systems that we use

SOLUTION

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

We requested commercial offer from various IT integrator companies in Kazakhstan to see who'll be able to present a more promising solution to such a non-standard problem. Also previous experience of working with these companies were taken into account

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

After analyzing out manual deployment process they decided to create a new custom app they called Semaphore which would allow to implement CI/CD for Fico within our technological stack Jenkins/Bitbucket/Jira/Nexus. The app is written in go/react.

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

There were 4 people during the whole project: 1 system architect, 1 manager and 2 engineers

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to match Fico releases schedule with other's system schedule so they were no longer waiting for Fico release to implement some integration feature

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

Project management was fine.We always had a good understanding of what will be implemented next and how long it takes before it runs. We had only some minor drawbacks in scheduling mostly because of the propitiatory nature of the Fico system and lack documentation. Besides this we've experienced no problem. We were communicating using Jira, whatsapp ans email.

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

They had a lot of experience with build CI/CD process and probably understood what we needed more than we did ourselves at the beginning of the project

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

Probably this project could've been implemented with a different technological stack (Java or C# instead of golang) because bank had very little expertise in golang when the project started and at first it looked like it could've a problem for bank to support this software after the development was finished (it is bank's current policy to have expertise in every major software that we're using whenever possible to reduce dependency on software vendors). But it turn out not to be a problem in the end, because we were able to increase our expertise in golang significantly (for totally unrelated reasons)

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CTO of IT for a Beeline Kazakhstan in Almaty.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

We had legacy code. We also used a old software. We needed to upgrade our technology in back office and sync development process between all departments. CORE 24/7 was hired to create a custom-developed system for the Beeline in-house use and for its clients.

SOLUTION

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

I found them on LinkedIn and looked at the resources they had. I asked for an offer and compared it to other ones I'd received. CORE 24/7 had the best experience and price point, so we decided to work with them. After detailed discussion with his team, we received a step-by-step working plan and instructions.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

We were looking to quickly migrate into the Kubernetes platform but lacked the necessary technical expertise. Also we needed a smooth and a fail-safe launch of the new services expecting heavy loads of traffic in the very first days of release. As well as smooth migration (without denial of service) of legacy services to Kubernetes platform

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

Our managers have been communicating with CORE 24/7 an account manager, a technical lead, together with a couple of a engineers who adresses any ad-hoc inquiries. The team size fluctuates depending on the task, but there have been about 5 people in total.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

CORE 24/7 successfully integrated Kubernetes into our structure, and it’s been working very well. Their team has provided quality services in a timely manner. When necessary, they propose improvements and enhancements to minimize problems down the road. Also We had the data protection audit and passed it without any major issues. In the past 1 ½ years, they did the majority of the software and devOps development that we had. They have done a good job and we have an ongoing relationship.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The project manager has done an effective job of selecting the right developers for different tasks. They have access to our internal project management tools, like our task tracker and coding repositories. They’ve done a good job of working alongside our internal team.

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

The team was very organized; everything was systematic. Automatic invoicing, personal account, task tracker, chatbot for slack and excellent documentation.

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

I liked everything very much, I don't see any drawbacks. I want to wish to continue to develop in the same direction in the same direction

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Polina Vertey, Head of Project management in “InFin-IT Solution” LLP.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7, and what were your goals?

CORE 24/7 provided outstaff devops sevices for financial industry projects. Namely, taking part in implementation of Digital Banking system in Halyk Bank of Kyrgyzstan.

SOLUTION

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

Our company had strong need in devops developers team, but we could not find full-time employees and it was decided to find a outsource company. CORE 24/7 has established as a professional team in devops development. As a result, we decided to hire CORE 24/7.

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

Building a high availability and fault-tolerant architecture of servers for Digital banking (clusters, kubernets, database, microservices architecture, client-server architecture, Rabbit MQ). As well as initial deployment pipelines (CI/CD).

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

4 employees, including 2 middle devops engineers, 1 senior devops engineer (team leader) and 1 project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

1. Devops tasks were performed in time. CORE 24/7 employees efficiently participated in the meetings with customers throughout project delivery.

2. We got a solution that holds 10,000 connections after stress testing.

3. We got positive feedback from the Bank.

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

CORE 24/7 works in Scrum, which turns out to be very effective way of working in our project to carry out a particular tasks. They select list of tasks that will be developed in next two weeks (sprint) and it helps customers to perform the management of the project productively.

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

CORE 24/7 can be concerned as a profitable team. Company has a personal project manager and a helpdesk engineer who are available 24/7 (24 hours 7 days a week). CORE 24/7 has a chatbot that helps to monitor the execution of tasks and provides monthly reports. CORE 24/7 professionally worked in the project.

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

Well done.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Admet Akhter, CEO at Akhter Studio. We provide software development & product management outsourcing services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

We had a full-cycle development project that also required the migration of the whole production and development infrastructure from bare metal to Amazon Web Services. Moreover, it requires the support of this infrastructure for 1 year.

SOLUTION

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

As we had not enough DevOps engineers in our team, we tried to find a good vendor. We already knew about Core 24/7 company before as they were our clients, but we never worked with them as a customer. However, they had good recommendations from our partners and we decided to start work with them.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

Core 24/7 reviewed our request and proposed the project plan that included logging and audit, database migration, containerization, and monitoring configuration apart from the process of infrastructure migration itself. The scope included the work with various AWS and ELK, Kafka, PostgreSQL, nginx technologies.

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

3 DevOps engineers, 1 DevOps team lead, and 1 project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our customer was completely satisfied with the job of Core 24/7. It was an important part of our contract and we did not regret that we chose this partner for the implementation.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their project manager used our Jira task tracker with overall project task management. I believe that they used Jira internally as well. We had weekly and daily calls for scope synchronization.

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

These guys are located in the same city as us. Moreover, they provide services that can be easily expanded worldwide.

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

These guys are located in the same city as us. Moreover, they provide services that can be easily expanded worldwide.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Team Lead. Payment System Provider with multi acquiring for business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CORE 24/7?

1. We needed to find experienced DevSecOps team to help us to build hybrid infrastructure splitted between AWS and local cluster.
2. Migrate from AWS.
3. Support for infrastructure

SOLUTION

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

1. Experienced DevSecOps engineers
2. Detailed feedbacks for all requests
3. Fast reaction on incidents
4. Comfortable solutions for developers

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

1. Setting up whole server cluster for developers environment
2. Up gitlab server and configure gitlab runners
3. Help and evolve deployment from pure kubernetes manifests to helm charts
4. Set up server cluster for production environment and passing PCI DSS compliance
5. Set up monitoring tools for services

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

About 3 persons. Whole DevSecOps engineers

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

With their help we save a lot of time of developers which spent on product development and not for solve devops problems. Also we got savings on infrastructure because of cut off resources on AWS.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Workflow process is simple. We use telegram group and telegram bot to create tickets for CORE24\7

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

They offer experienced opinions about infrastructure solutions.

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

to pay attention to details to prevent a little mistakes