Devopsbay

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior engineering manager of a software development company, focusing on developing an end-to-end machine learning platform. I run the data prep engineering team responsible for preparing and ingesting data, wrangling, and getting it ready for modeling.

What challenge were you trying to address with Devopsbay?

We’re trying to build a new product while keeping an older, similar product alive, maintained, and serving our customers. To that end, we wanted to bring in Devopsbay to take over the development support and maintenance of the old product while we shifted the existing team to the newer product.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Not only are they taking over the engineering aspect and coding of the 10-year-old product, but they’ve also been handling customer support, triaging field-reported issues, and resolving them.

The product is an ETL, a software that extracts data from another system, transforms it, and loads it somewhere else. We utilize Java, Scala, Spark, MongoDB, and an open source software called TeamCity. Moreover, they manage our testing process and provide us with QA, developer, end, and integration testing. They also take over the DevOps aspect associated with this project.

In addition, they’re responsible for maintaining the production infrastructure. We have two production environments for this product; one in the US and one in the EU. they maintain both systems and its development environments.

What is the team composition?

We have one project lead, two senior Java Scala developers, two mid-level Java Scala developers, one senior DevOps specialist, and one QA specialist.

How did you come to work with Devopsbay?

Our company has acquired numerous other companies over the past 5–10 years, and Devopsbay actually came along with one of the acquisitions. We analyzed the performance and looked at the track records of all our contracted vendors and based on those analyses and reports, we decided to opt for Devopsbay. 

Geographically, they fit what we needed really well. Their cost was reasonable and competitive, and we liked that they seemed to have strong engineers.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership began in March 2022, and it’s still ongoing.

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

They took over a 10-year-old product that had about 150 customers using it and have grown to about 350 since then. They have not only taken over an existing mature product, but they had to deal with a significant scale of growth, which is a success story in itself.

How did Devopsbay perform from a project management standpoint?

They perform fairly well from a project management standpoint, considering the huge scale of the project. They’re able to provide a suitable manager to improve the flow of the process, and they're still running the entire project.

We use JIRA extensively for project management and utilize Slack, Google Meet, and email to communicate.
 
What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re impressed with their flexibility in working within the statement of work and ability to bring in resources as required. The team has been creative about meeting our needs as the climate of the project changes, which has been very helpful.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were some issues with availability. We kept losing continuity, so we had to keep retraining people for that particular role, which didn’t allow us to divorce from the work as cleanly as we wanted. 

Although I believe that was an isolated situation due to COVID-19 and the ongoing conflict but other than that, I can’t really think of anything they need to improve on.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise you to have transparency on the principle of what you need. If you want to get the most out of them, treat them like true partners and meet them halfway because the contract doesn’t have to dictate every interaction.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Sunmetric is a company that wants to provide companies from the RES sector with a tool for quick verification of land and roofs considered for photovoltaic installations. I am the director of business development and product owner for sunmetric applications.

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

devopsbay was to develop artificial intelligence algorithms for satellite image analysis and then build a browser-based application that combines the data obtained from the analysis of satellite images with public data and combines them into reports useful for our clients

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

We chose devopsbay because of our extensive experience in developing neural networks and the fact that in the past we have completed several smaller projects together and we were very pleased with the cooperation.

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

The scope of work included research and development works on the creation of artificial intelligence models recognizing the objects set up in satellite photos and geological maps, writing an application for downloading data from public services and connecting them with data obtained through the neural network, and then setting up the server infrastructure and publishing the said application in a safe manner . In addition to research and development, devopsbay has created its own unit for training AI models

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

There are 7 people working on the project, including two backend developers with Python, 2 frontend developers, one QA, one DevOps and Project Manager.

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

The project is not finished yet, but we are generally satisfied with the work devopsbay is doing for us. At the moment, we can't share the statistics yet.

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

Project management and work organization are at a high level. Elements of the SCRUM methodology are used, including daily meetings of the technical team, sprint’s, retro’s, etc. Work is organized, measured and checked using tools such as Jira or GitHub.

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

I was most impressed by the ease with which they built a unit for training AI models and the children's joy and great commitment during this difficult work.

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

In our opinion, we should focus more on more detailed functional planning at an early stage of product development. It caused us some delays, but in the end it all turned out well.

Please describe your company and your position there.

HiPets is an all-in-one pet care app designed for pet parents. We believe that life with pet is better, that's why we make caring for them easier. For all busy but loving&caring pet parents we are creating a mobile and web app that enables instant booking for all pet related services - starting with a vet and ending up on pet sitting.

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsbay?

Devopsbay task was to refactor our existing codebase to work with containers, design cloud infrastructure to be able to handle more traffic and growing user base, then migrate our current system from OVH to new AWS infrastructure.

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

They were recommended to us by one of the agencies we've been working earlier. The initial calls with them convinced us that this was the provider we want to work with. It seemed to be a good mixture of their previous experience and reasonable time&cost estimation.

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

During the initial stages Devopsbay provided us with few solutions to our issues with system stability and traffic handling. After we choose one of the solutions, the next step was to refactor existing applications so they would work in docker containers and be able to support new AWS infrastructure. First primary objective was to move production database to RDS and be able to support S3 files. Next steps involved Elasticbeanstalk configuration, CI/CD pipelines integration and monitoring.

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

Initially small team, 2-3 engineers working on the migration, later on working in work-on-demand system with one dedicated engineer (I strongly recommend Maciej, perfect communication, always available when needed and fantastic problem solving attitude)

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

We successfully migrated our platform to AWS, resulting in cost reduction and higher scalability that can handle now significantly bigger volumes of traffic.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very good communication on both slack and daily calls. I was impressed with their accessibility, responsiveness, and great communication skills.

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

It wasn't rocket science so I'm not sure if anything that could be unique in this project, but I rate very high the communication and relation with the company already after the project, we constantly work on our service improvement constantly implement new features which require changes in our cloud infrastructure. Though we are in a work-on-demand system, nothing has changed in terms of their approach to us as their client.

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

There's always a space for improvement, but from my perspective everything was fine.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CMO of Do Sport Now, a sports and wellness company. We have a database of local sports activities and playgrounds for all amateurs sportspeople. Our end users can find a sports activity in their local place, they just have to look on our platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Devopsbay?

We needed help with our existing website.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Devopsbay did an audit on our existing website. We then planned and designed phases for the transition to the cloud. The main problem with our product was it took 6–12 months to introduce new features for the system. Since we had a Monolith web application, Devopsbay had to divide our platform into microservices and containers. The second thing we struggled with was the multiple timeouts on our website.

After the audit, they started phase one which involved creating tooling and continuous integration (CI)/ continuous delivery (CD) processes in the AWS cloud. They moved the current product and whole database to Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS). For phase two, the team developed a new version of the platform that would be based on a number of services with a joint API gateway. The last phase involved further optimization and load testing for the app on the production and the new environment. They also did AB testing for the new features.

Overall, we were in charge of all the design and everything on the backend was on their side. Currently, they work as our advisors and good colleagues. They monitor our system, and from time to time, we have audit checkmarks.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with six people including a project manager. On our side, we have eight people. 

How did you come to work with Devopsbay?

We did some research online and found them through Google. We thought it’d be nice to try someone local.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2020, and it’s ongoing.

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

We don’t have issues with timeouts any longer with our application. We’ve also achieved about 30% cost reduction because we moved everything to the cloud with them. They've done their work excellently and conducted workshops for our people at the end of the project so that we could handle all our problems, which increased our internal team's technological maturity. With their work, we've also reduced the time we could introduce new features from 6–12 months for a large feature to about six weeks — it’s a huge achievement for us.

How did Devopsbay perform from a project management standpoint?

The team utilizes scrum methodology and two-week-long sprints. Then, they use Jira as their project management tool. Moreover, their project manager is great and communicative. He has amazingly conducted workshops for our employees. We keep in touch with them every using Slack and GoogleMeet.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve given us good estimations of what they’re doing. For example, if they told us that it would take them two weeks to complete the project, they would fulfill it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing I’d have them improve. Other people may think they should do more advertisement.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Define very particular ways of communication for your project. For other clients, it might not be so obvious to do this, but it’s been a huge success in our engagement.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO & Creative Director of a branding agency located in Gdansk but operating in all major cities of Poland.

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsbay?

We hired Devopsbay to develop a tool which is helping us aggregate and monitor all marketing-related data in real-time.

What were your goals for this project?

Our main objective was to increase efficiency of our efforts. The thing which triggered us into starting this project was the situation in which we were wasting tons of time for "jumping" from one tool to another in order to gather insight which is essential in making the best possible decisions for our clients.

How did you select this vendor?

Devopsbay felt our vibe from the very beginning and simply understood my needs within seconds. Their ability to connect the dots impressed me and my business partner. We were confident they were the right fit for our company and they prove again and again that we were right.

Describe the project in detail.

Marketing Data Aggregation System is simply a tool for evaluating and comparing analysis options. It's a tool capable of generating aggregate-level time series data related to marketing measurement (e.g., channel-level marketing spend, website visits, competitor's spending, pricing, sales volume, etc.).

It is used to model a wide variety of marketing situations that include different mixes of advertising spending, levels of ad effectiveness, types of ad targeting, sales seasonality, competitor's activity, and much more.

Key features are marketing performance metrics, including return on ad spending and final return on ad spend. System was built on Kubernetes using microservices written in Python and Go.

What was the team composition?

We worked directly with a Team Leader who was not only managing the project but also writing the code himself. Apart from the coding and PM part he conducted workshops in order to collect full information about our actual needs. The cooperation was smooth and if there was any trouble then we had full access to the founder. Who was responsive and helpful.

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

We managed to optimize the flow of information in our organization. Which led to better and quicker decision-making.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Thanks to how well they communicate we understood our needs better. Our initial expectations were a little different than the final ones and it's thanks to their input that we could make a well-informed decision to customize the soft better to our KPIs.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The speed and clarity of communication impressed us. All the teammates involved in the process were to the point and sincere at the same time. Company's culture is one of their strengths, no doubt about that.

Are there any areas for improvement?

You can always get a better price but it would be hard to get a better quality than these guys provide

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an executive for a Cloud computing company. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Devopsbay?

We needed some custom platform development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided specifications. They were heavily integrated into our engineering organization; involved in product planning and software development.
We collaboratively designed a sprint and they worked with our engineers to build the software. It went through QA, and then was shipped to production.
Kubernetes was the world of the software. They used Python and Node.js, as well as SQL for database. They did a lot of networking, using libraries such as RabbitMQ.

What is the team composition?

We have a main point of contact, but there are about six people working on the team.

How did you come to work with Devopsbay?

We reached out to them. They were working on a similar product, and we connected to see about working together. They have a lot of expertise in Kubernetes. 

How much have you invested with them?

We roughly spent $2 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in October 2018, and it’s ongoing.

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

They produce quality code and collaborate well with our internal team. Measuring them purely on their speed and productivity as an engineering team, they have been successful. 

How did Devopsbay perform from a project management standpoint?

We use several tools, including Jira and Quip. They are communicative if they’re behind schedule, and they’re generally good at coming through when we need them. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Kubernetes is a new, rapidly evolving space. It has been beneficial working with a team that understands it in detail and has worked with it in production. They possess a lot of expertise.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Set up tools in a way to minimize the friction of working remotely.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I used to be CEO of an enterprise machine learning platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Devopsbay?

We needed a partner to help build our software.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Devopsbay developed most of our software orchestration using Kubernetes, cloud deployment and automation. The platform's hosted on-premise and on AWS. Their team deployed the software for a few customers. They also built the frontend and backend of our end-user application. Their team used a huge stack of technologies including Kubernetes, AWS, Python, and GO.

What is the team composition?

We worked with around 12 people. We had our product manager direct the project, so their team consisted of engineers mostly.

How did you come to work with Devopsbay?

I found them online. I interviewed between 20–30 different freelancers or companies. We looked for technical experience and cost but not location. The cost of Devopsbay’s services was good.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $1,000,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the collaboration in January 2017 and finished working together at the end of 2018.

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

The quality of their work was good. They built the software and delivered it to a few customers before other tech companies did. The product has worked relatively well. It was a leading software in the industry.

How did Devopsbay perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Jira and Github.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were good with Kubernetes and DevOps. Devopsbay was a strong team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication and raising risks could be improved. Their team likes to do everything perfectly. Engineers tend to do that naturally. Sometimes for management, it’s better to know the risks.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of Leanfra. We deliver the most cutting edge high-performance computing solutions in the world. We built our hardware stack using only the most cutting edge hardware.

Our software solution is a simple, self-served set of services for provisioning, deployment, and scaling of your tasks. We designed our entire stack to be extremely scalable while making sure virtually zero performance loss as you scale.

We designed our environment to withstand the most demanding tasks on the planet with almost no code changes while using the most advanced standards, like system-wide RDMA over Infiniband, optimized OS and frameworks.

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsbay?

Programming what we need requires a very highly skills developers, DevOps and SREs with knowledge in High Performance Computing, Supercomputing and high end networking.

its was both very challenging and fascinating to find a group with the entire skills set needed to program an infrastructure management system for such high end and bleeding edge technologies.

What were your goals for this project?

Deliver the best user experience possible with no compromises. build a modular code base for future expansion using micro services to allow scalability and performance. follows very strict programming guidelines and not trivial architecture to achieve flawless experience.

How did you select this vendor?

I looked a lot, websites like Upwork, recruitment companies, friends. eventually I reach Michal since I was working with him in the past and asked him if he have the time and capacity to deliver my specs. the answer was Yes, so we started to work together shortly after that.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Our was to build a complete "cloud-like" management back office, API and clients for our high performance environment.

Devopsbay provided the technical people, we managed them since in our case R&D manager required proprietary knowledge. Devopsbay did provide a project manager as well to help be in sync and setting the expectation internally even better.

What was the team composition?

We required, a full stack developers, CI & deployment developer and project manager.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We clients gave us a really positive feedback. they delivered a superb experience, API and documentation.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We have proprietary system and architecture, the project manager in Devopsbay cached up pretty pretty fast and did a lot to make sure communication is very good.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

People, they are great, knowledgeable and passionate about what they do.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There is always a room for improvement but for me, for what we payed given what we got in both time and results, I cant complain, they did great.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of Gallios, a data science and product engineering firm.

What challenge were you trying to address with Devopsbay?

We needed help with devOps services and containers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped us to establish good offshore engineering services in Poland.

They mainly use Kubernetes, Dockers, and CI/CD.

What is the team composition?

There are 3-4 people. At one point there were 6-7 people.

How did you come to work with Devopsbay?

They were introduced to me by my partner. I believe he found them through an open-source development community. They were one of the engineering groups that had good experience in the areas of Dockers and Kubernetes.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2018 and the work is ongoing.

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

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.

How did Devopsbay perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is an area they need to improve.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They delivered pretty much what we asked of them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Project management could be improved.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are the roof racks rental specialists. We provide the transport solutions by renting to the customers roof racks, roof boxes, tow racks, bike racks. Our team is specialised in Thule brand.

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsbay?

Our company hired Devopsbay to build a new and professional website.

What were your goals for this project?

Our main goal was to build a website on safe engine, which CMS will be very easy for our team to make a changes. The second goal was that the site had to be different then the others, which could help us to bulid our brand.

How did you select this vendor?

Devopsbay was recomended by the other company.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They did everything form A-Z like.

What was the team composition?

Their team contains from 20 specialists, like: designers, graphics designers, front and back end developers, advisors.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Their team had regular meetings with our company. Very important topics were discussed on online meetings. We were very satisfied how our project was manager by Devopsbay.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The main and the most impressive in Devopsbay was how they treat this project, how they contact with us. We felt like we were theirs most important customer, we received form them a lot of advices, many fresh vieves for the issues about we didn't thought about before.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We didn't found any week points of Devopsbay.