LCloud Sp. z o.o.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of e-commerce at Guardian News & Media.

What challenge were you trying to address with LCloud Sp. z o.o. ?

We engage with LCloud Sp. z o.o. for hosting and maintenance.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We needed a hosting infrastructure for our online dating platform, Guardian Soulmates. The website and apps are hosted on AWS. Beyond hosting, their team created a list of efficiency and security improvements and have been working through that on a consultative basis for us.

What is the team composition?

My colleague works with their developers regularly. I normally talk to Jacek (CEO & CTO, LCloud Sp. z o.o.), but there is a ticketing system we use for daily communication.

How did you come to work with LCloud Sp. z o.o. ?

We inherited through developers we were initially using. Our team wasn’t aware that they were contracted with them and providing a service. Even though we changed developers, we decided to keep LCloud Sp. z o.o. on.

How much have you invested with them?

We generally spend £5,000 (approximately $6,600 USD) a month, but additional projects are about £50,000 a year (approximately $66,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with LCloud Sp. z o.o. in November 2017 and the services are ongoing.

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

Due to their services, our product and business have been quite stable. We’re comfortable with what LCloud Sp. z o.o. delivers. Our company has limited downtime, and if there are any issues, their team addresses them quickly. They’ve figured out a number of efficiencies that have resulted in a reduction of AWS and hosting fees.

How did LCloud Sp. z o.o. perform from a project management standpoint?

LCloud Sp. z o.o. is responsive across all levels of business, getting back to our team quickly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

LCloud Sp. z o.o. provides suggestions on how to improve our business and strategies. They’re some of the best AWS technicians in Poland.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing specific.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Establishing the service levels and workload schedule is important. There can be some ambiguities with a process like this, regarding how much work is expected and how many hours should be done. Clients should make that clear from the start and specify everything in the contract. This would be extremely helpful.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I head up the engineering side of Perengo. We are doing a programmatic recruiting platform targeted at on-demand workers and blue-collar jobs.

What challenge were you trying to address with LCloud?

We were setting up a large infrastructure in terms of micro-services, database structures, and so on. We wanted to host all of that on AWS, and I was looking for a dev ops team that would support the entire architecture.

What was the scope of their involvement?

LCloud works on anything that’s AWS-related or has to do with the server architecture or server communication. They set up all the EC2 instances, the elastic beanstalk, the firewall, any kind of connection between the VPC’s (virtual private cloud), the user accounts, or the IAM (identity and access management) roles. They take care of anything that has to do with the AWS stack.

How did you come to work with LCloud?

We advertised on all the platforms that allowed me to look for freelancers or part-time workers. I got a bunch of replies, went through them, selected LCloud for an interview and finally ended up with them.

How much have you invested with LCloud?

We have them on an hourly basis. There are months we need them full time, eight hours a day, and months that we only have them two hours a week. It all depends on usage. There is a component where I used their support team to be on standby 24/7 in case of emergencies, and that’s a fixed monthly rate. If there’s a server outage caused by an application developer doing something wrong, they charge a little extra, but that was all part of our agreement.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together about two years ago, and the relationship is ongoing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The initial goal when we hired them was to set up the architecture and then basically take it over in-house. After a couple of months working with them, I saw absolutely no reason to replace them or hire someone internally. LCloud gave us quality work that was well thought out. They gave me feedback on ideas based on their experience. I liked their proactive approach. I can’t tell you exactly what I pay them, but it’s definitely less than I would pay for the same team here in the US. They do have some people who don’t speak the best English, but it hasn’t been an issue so far.

How did LCloud perform from a project management standpoint?

I have no problems. All the deadlines have been met. I’m also very aware of how to set deadlines right, so I don’t think I’ve ever given them a task they couldn’t achieve. They have their own ticketing system, which they use internally, and we also have our own internal system, so we had to sit together and make the two systems talk to each other. We sat down one afternoon and worked out how to do that. It comes down to using the right tools for the right job, and we haven’t had issues. I would even say it’s the other way around; if I give them until next Monday for certain task, it was set to ‘done’ in the ticketing system the next day. I’m sometimes surprised at how fast they are.

Their team is flexible at scaling to meet goals and demands. We had an initial discussion about setting up the system, and then a follow-up discussion. There’s a difference between administering a working system and making gradual extensions to it, of which we had a lot. We came to an agreement on the number of hours we generally needed them. If we would foresee a bigger system having to be deployed, then we would increase the number of hours. There was never a problem getting them to increase the hours on short notice.

What did you find most impressive about LCloud?

What I value the most about them is their proactivity in thinking things through for us. They’ve seen things that work and don’t work, and they apply that experience to our solution. They proactively tell us a better way to do things, and that’s a key reason I never replaced them.

Are there any areas LCloud could improve?

The only thing that sometimes annoys me is the communication challenge. We use Slack internally, and we have certain rooms connected to their chat system. Sometimes people pop up who you’ve never spoken to before, as their entire group is now in our chatroom. Some of these people don’t speak English very well. When they write something, you have to ask for clarification on what they mean. Those are not the key people assigned to our account, but more the 24/7 support people.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company is a consulting partner and service provider for Amazon Web Services environments. We consult, design, implement, and support infrastructures that are DevOps-centric. I am a co-founder and the chief executive officer of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with LCloud?

We needed the talent and expertise that could help extend our business.

What was the scope of their involvement?

At this point, we've worked with LCloud for more than 40 clients. They're an arm of our company in many ways, even though we're independent entities. LCloud staffs multiple full-time people on our projects, both for point of person response and for a variety of project delivery capacities. The work has involved IT cloud architecture, DevOps, automation of platforms, systems administration, remediation of system issues, and even straight-up software development.

How did you come to work with LCloud?

I found LCloud through different professional networks in the Amazon Web Services world. Three years ago, it was much more of a niche world.

How much have you invested with LCloud?

This is confidential.

What is the status of this engagement?

I first connected with LCloud's founder three years ago. The relationship is ongoing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Stats and metrics can be hard to ascertain in our world since we're involved in different types of work. So far, the feedback has been absolutely top-notch. LCloud has continued to grow the team, bringing in people who break the mold of offshore engineers. They're aggressive, sharp, and creative thinkers, and they're technically superior. I couldn't say anything better about the quality of work we've gotten from LCloud.

How did LCloud perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was not a dedicated area a few years ago, when LCloud was a much smaller team. They've recently added this capacity. We've been working with people who have a project management mindset, and we've had great results with this in the past year.

What did you find most impressive about LCloud from other providers?

LCloud's technical acumen is top-notch.

Are there any areas LCloud could improve?

Building out the team size would be an improvement. We use much of LCloud's staff, so the fact that they're a small team has been our biggest challenge.