Devopsity

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Engineering of an education company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Engaging and adaptive learning games, aligned to school curricula and proven to accelerate progress.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Devopsity to accomplish?

• Terraform upgrade
• Migration of databases to AWS RDS
• Migration of AWS infrastructure from US to EU region

SOLUTION

How did you find Devopsity?

Referral

Why did you select Devopsity over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Devopsity were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The project initially involved upgrading and improving organisation of Terraform code. Then this improved code was used to recreate infrastructure in a different AWS region. We completed two migration - one of databases from EC2 instances to RDS, and one of applications from EC2 auto-scaling groups to ECS cluster

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Relocation of databases and services to a different region with no data loss or downtime
• Improved efficiency of deployment
• Reduced costs for running cloud services

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

We had weekly check-ins with engineers as well as the project lead, which kept us up to date with day-to-day developments and also provided an opportunity to discuss and refine the roadmap.

What was your primary form of communication with Devopsity?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

They helped us achieve our immediate goals on time and pushed us towards improvements that we didn't think we would be able to fit in.

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

Communication outside meetings was generally good but could be improved, especially when the work being undertaken had a potential impact on other projects being done by the team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Develop software to support hotel IT infrastructure.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsity?

• CI/CD
• performance and scaling
• monitoring
• security enhancements
• infra audit and improvements

SOLUTION

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

We put an RFP together to support our varied infra needs and we selected Devopsity based on their experience, flexibility, integration with their team, quick communication policy.

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

They first started with an audit of the various areas requiring attention and ranked them based on impact and effort required. This made it easier for us to plan a schedule of tasks to resolve. Task communication was made simple by adding Devopsity members to our project management software and having them plan and update their tasks in a timely and organized manner. There was no need to work with any external platforms to communicate the progress of their tasks with our team.

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

We had support from three of their team members including a Devops manager, Devops IC and a project admin.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The autoscaling setup and test were successful and we received supporting documentation outlining the setup configuration including the deployment within our repository. Additional cost optimizations were successfully implemented resulting in lowered monthly GCP costs.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication was done via Slack as well as project management software. Weekly update meetings were held with all team members of Devopsity to ensure smooth and consistent communication.

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

They were an extension of our team and were happy to communicate with any of our team members directly to resolve issues without having to wait for a weekly sync. Urgent issues were addressed promptly and communication was the key to working successfully together.

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

None that I can think of. They were upfront with their limitations in terms of which technologies they could and could not support so there were no surprises.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the head of product development at ZIPZERO Global ltd. ZIPZERO's mission is to help consumers earn on the enormous value of our purchase data, our business is based on B2C mobile applications (for Android and iOS) that allow to receive a refund of some costs for stationary and online purchases.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We came to Devopsity by recommendation, we needed support in the development of our application infrastructure based Google Cloud Platform and the automation of CI/CD processes. The sudden users increase of our application meant that we needed additional support in the development of our application infrastructure.

SOLUTION

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

Devopsity at the initial stage of the analysis of our project showed a great understanding of our needs and the stage we were at, the solution they proposed quickly turned out to be effective. Due to the limited budget, Devopsity has prepared an offer for us adequate to the funds we could invest in this area.

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

Devopsity was hired to achieve progress on multiple technical and business targets, including:

• improving developer workflow and CI/CD process by extending automation
• review and adjust GCP and other SaaS resources usage to achieve lover costs
• address multiple backlog relating to upgrades and software component replacements

They worked mainly on following devstack:

• Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• CI/CD: Helm, Helmsman, Ansible
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch
• Platform: Kubernetes (GKE)

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

The number of people involved in our project was flexible for our limited budget. It was always at least one person with the constant support of the Devopsity CEO. We collaborated with a total of 5 experts from Devopsity.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are very pleased with the results, the quality of the application and implemented solutions work without any complaints, solutions implemented by Devopsity are used by today and facilitate the development of the application.

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

We engaged Devopsity specialists to our scrum teams, we worked together on the implemented solutions. We used Jira for backlog and task distribution and Confluence for project documentation.

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

Professionalism, commitment to the project and a flexible approach to the selection of the package of services provided.

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

There were times when low priority tasks were completed late

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a Digital Marketing company which specialises in providing website and digital marketing presence for a global non-profit organisation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We needed to develop a scalable global website strategy where the requirement was to provide individual websites for over 100 countries in local languages. We were keen to use Amazon AWS services to achieve this and needed a hosting partner that we could trust to successfully manage and support emerging cloud based services.

SOLUTION

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

I had personal experience of working with one of the founders of Devopsity on a large scale project and had confidence in his technical experience and ability to work in a team. Someone I knew I could rely on.

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

This has been a long term project which has grown over a number of years. Whenever we have needed to look at improvements in performance or resilience Devopsity have considered cost effective hosting changes, taking into account the latest Amazon AWS technology. Changes have been well-managed to minimise risk.

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

For the design and implementation phase Devopsity provided a cloud architect, lead platform engineer and two platform engineers. At the moment we're being supported by a maintenance duty team consisting of multiple engineers working in rota.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Implementation of a Kubernetes hosting architecture has reduced our overall monthly Amazon hosting costs while providing a more resilient, scalable system.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We have regular meetings between Devopsity and our app development team to map out improvements and new requirements. We use a shared Slack interface to get fairly immediate responses to our questions and support issues.

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

They have a very professional service, and they provide confidence that any hosting issues will be dealt with, so we don't need to be concerned and can focus on the application and content aspects.

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

Perhaps could improve the responsiveness to low priority issues. Although still within acceptable times.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm a consultant who works with various web and mobile technologies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Devopsity to accomplish for your development consulting projects?

We needed help with cloud consulting, cybersecurity, and DevOps managed services. I've worked with them on projects that involve AWS, including AWS migrations from other environments, AWS cloud consulting and implementation, AWS security, general AWS DevOps, and breach detection and incident response.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Devopsity started with an assessment of migrating a whole suite of apps from Heroku to AWS. Upon agreeing on the scope, they implemented the migration using an IaaS approach. Since that finished, they've provided ongoing support on all things related to AWS and general DevOps, including cost optimization, security improvements, and more.

Specifically, they've implemented Terraform IaaS that utilizes AWS ECS to deploy our apps and AWS S3 for static content. They've also implemented AWS RDS and managed AWS Redis, later switching to Valkyrie, and AWS EventBridge to handle cron-like scheduled tasks.

Moreover, Devopsity has fully implemented multiple accounts for multiple environments, AWS IAM access management, and AWS GuardDuty. They've also worked on setting this all up with Cloudflare and provided refined CI/CD in Semaphore to deploy to AWS automatically, all using Docker.

What is the team composition?

We work with 2–5 teammates from Devopsity.

How did you come to work with Devopsity?

They were referred to me. We chose them over other options because they had high ratings, their pricing fit our budget, and they offered good value for the cost.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in December 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The migration to AWS was completed as planned, resulting in a more maintainable environment that allowed the apps to grow. The ongoing DevOps support has allowed our dev team to focus on working on code instead of handling deployment. Moreover, our infrastructure costs have been lowered.

Although I don't have direct comparisons with Heroku anymore, since it's been years, the automation has saved our developers multiple hours. Our apps never had that much traffic to need scalability to kick in, but the security is definitely a plus compared to Heroku. Devopsity has come up with additional layers like GuardDuty and other AWS-related things like tracking unusual behavior. Since moving to AWS, we haven't had any infrastructure-related outages.

How did Devopsity perform from a project management standpoint?

They deliver on time, and their communication is always clear and precise. We communicate through virtual meetings, emails, and messaging apps.

What did you find most impressive or unique about them?

I'm impressed by their ability to come up with solutions to things I didn't even know might be a problem.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I'm happy with the way they've handled everything.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

This is actually the second project I've worked with them on. The first one was pretty similar in scope but shorter, and both went great.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the co-founder of an annotation platform for AI.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsity?

Our company required support for a complex domain migration and for monitoring our AWS infrastructure.

SOLUTION

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

We received a recommendation, and the deciding factor was their flexibility to adapt to our needs.

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

Complex domain migration that included considering on-Premises deployments. DevOps services supporting our AWS cluster, including deployments, and the implementation of a monitoring system using Amazon CloudWatch.

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

Their CTO was our main point of contact, but we worked with different DevOps specialists depending on the task. They were always punctual in all meetings and delivered as estimated. They were very flexible and professional. It has been a pleasure working with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They completed all the tasks as scheduled.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

All the work was done remotely. They were always punctual in all meetings and delivered as estimated. Depending on the scope, we communicated via calls, IM messaging or emails.

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

Their advanced DevOps skills and their flexibility were top-notch!

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

Sometimes their reports were hard to understand, but they promptly added all relevant information.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Devopsity?

We needed to set up part of our infrastructure on Azure, but used them for AWS consulting before.

SOLUTION

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

We spoke with a few consultancies and chose Devopsity because they seemed most competent and were also good & quick communicators during the selection process.

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

We scoped it out internally, then had kickoff with them. The actual work happened with regular communication and then a handover.

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

Two consultants and their co-founder.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of our clients went live on the Azure infrastructure set up by Devopsity.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very good. They were very responsive to our needs.

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

Clear and responsive communication. They care about customers being successful and happy.

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

No.