OpsWorks Co.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Ovalmoney

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Offering various financial services across Europe.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire OpsWorks Co. to accomplish?

• Support our whole technology operations with Devops know-how.

SOLUTION

How did you find OpsWorks Co.?

Referral, Other

Why did you select OpsWorks Co. over others?

Great culture fit, Good value for cost, Referred to me

What was the size of OpsWorks Co.’s team?

6-10 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with OpsWorks Co.?

Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

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

Helped us moving all our infrastructure onto AWS and close down our existing on-prem datacenter locations. Introduced Kubernetes an modern build-pipelines. Implemented monitoring based opensource technologies. Upskilled our developers on cloud-native technologies and best-practices.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Substantial cost savings
• Increased efficiency in development
• Reduced error rate

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

They delivered in a timely fashion. Requests from us were accommodated without any undue questions or extra costs. The engineers were available virtually at all times and regularly went beyond what would have been realistically expected from them.

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

The way their engineers work together is really impressive. Since they share knowledge between each other extensively there was never a point when any of them would get stuck or even slow down. Their commitment to work is also unparalleled.

Are there any areas for improvement or something {provider_name} could have done differently?

Anything we found to be improved was already fed back to OpsWorks who took action since. So no, nothing comes to my mind.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am an executive of the company Wyden. Wyden ist the global leader in enabling financial institutions to efficiently trade and manage digital assets

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire OpsWorks Co.?

The Wyden server stores several applications. This required constant server operation. To manage resources wisely, the company turned to OpsWorks Co. for a dedicated DevOps engineer to optimize and maintain the IT infrastructure.

SOLUTION

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

We chose OpsWorks Co. based on their experience and expertise. Our main task was to optimize resources and server performance. Noting the cases and reviews of the company, we immediately contacted the representative of the company, who explained what we needed and how to implement our plans.

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

We identified several important milestones. We needed to create an easily manageable, highly secure and predictable infrastructure, make it easy to maintain, and create an improved CI/CD pipeline. The OpsWorks Co. team started by upgrading the Linux servers, creating test environments, and reconfiguring - this took all the infrastructure tasks off our shoulders and allowed us to focus on the product.

Then, to avoid latency, be more stable and scalable, the engineering team made it easier to move all the infrastructure bricks between different virtualization systems by containerizing the applications stored on the server. To improve manageability, they also prepared the server for horizontal scaling. Further to improve CI/CD Pipelines, engineers at OpsWorks Co. streamlined the workflow so that software testing now runs without any queues. This has allowed for faster updates and releases.

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

1 DevOps engineer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We got the most important thing - the ability to focus on optimizing the software rather than maintaining the infrastructure. We also got better security by isolating services and using the latest versions of all applications, better manageability through containerization and orchestration, shorter time to market because updates are released faster and the ability to strategically improve infrastructure.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

There were no communication problems between the OpsWorks team and us. The vendor team always answered our questions, when we needed to know something, as well as provided reports and held rallies on the results of the work done.

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

During the work, the OpsWorks Co. team proved to be true professionals. They were very attentive to our requests, as well as provided additional recommendations for improvement and implemented them.

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

No, the company has implemented all of our requirements and more.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm CTO and co-founder of Otoqi. We are a car logistic & services "tech company". Our freelance drivers move, charge, clean, drive to and from workshops anyone's car. We also manage each and every possible on street service for carsharing fleets.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire OpsWorks Co.?

We were looking for a strong IT company to audit and improve all our strategies regarding network security. It covered cloud backup, cloud network protection, user and API access controls, improved CI-CD security and automatic checks.

SOLUTION

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

We searched on Upwork for a company with a strong reputation and clear in-house skills. The initial approach of Opswork convinced us as they asked relevant questions, offered some preliminary analysis in order to understand the scope of work and didn't promise impossible things.

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

They first audited all our IT infrastructure, involving developers and PM. Then we agreed upon a list of improvements, based on clear pros and cons for each recommandation they made. Some were not relevant at this stage of our company. Others were implemented by them, exactly as per the estimated budget. Communication was very good and delivery of modifications was smooth without any impact ever on the production. They eventually produced clear documentation on what they had investigated.

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

Sales representative + 2 specialists were involved

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They completed each of the 3 phases (audit + 2 phases for implementation) according to budget and estimated time. The implementation of the security layers works (nothing blocked) and has greatly increased our overall security.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The implementation was followed and managed by my Project Manager. The communication was fluid, they had regular meetings to start with and then only when Slack communication wasn't enough. Opswork always made sure to communicate new changes to the dev team before any change was applied.

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

They really knew their job and quickly adapted to our specificities. The pre-project phase was very good with good communication & time and cost estimates.

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

Nothing serious !

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

OTP Bank Group is one of the largest independent financial service providers in Central and Eastern Europe, with a full range of banking services for private individuals and corporate clients. OTP Group comprises large subsidiaries, granting services in insurance, real estate, factoring, leasing and asset management, investment, and pension funds. My position is Head of Corporate Systems Engineering Department.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire OpsWorks Co.?

We hired OpsWorks Co. for CI/CD implementation and disaster recovery setup.

SOLUTION

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

OTP Group launched a tender. OpsWorks Co. took part in it along with other DevOps providers. We choose the company for their solution and value for money services.

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

Kubernetes cluster setup The solution for the OTP system is based on building a Kubernetes cluster on the client’s servers. Kubernetes was installed to manage the load at any time to provide enough capacity for all bank users. It enabled the OTP IT infrastructure to scale automatically. In fact, not only scaling was the goal.

Kubernetes reserves the copies of the infrastructure for its fast recovery on other servers at the time of malfunction. Therefore, reduce downtime thanks to an automatic reaction. Simply put, if anything goes wrong that results in the inability of the bank to provide services through their website or app, Kubernetes rolls out the same infrastructure and sets it up on a different server in seconds.

Logging and Monitoring The combination of Open Distro and Prometheus formed a proactive monitoring solution that helped the OTP team stay on top of any upcoming malicious events. We also developed a custom parser to get their logs in the format they need.

Audit of the cluster security The OpsWorks Co. engineering team performed an audit to reinforce the security measured in the OTP IT infrastructure. The result of the audit was documented recommendations for additional security measures implemented.

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

there is a DevOps engineer and a Solutions Architect at demand

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Easily and automatically scalable infrastructure
• Infrastructure reservation for quicker recovery
• Reduced possibility for downtime
• Enhanced cluster security

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The communication between our teams couldn’t be easier. The OpsWorks Co. team that works at our projects consists of a Project Manager who is always responsive and never leaves messages not replied for longer than 15 minutes (it’s a response time defined in our SLA). Also, there is a DevOps engineer and a Solutions Architect at demand.

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

We found Opsworks Co. to be a reliable partner. They are always in touch and respond to all our requests. The most impressive is how they managed to meet all the security requirements and even give us some recommendations during the security audit.

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

We haven't noticed any so far.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Global Forwarding Enterprises is a logistics company headquartered in Manalapan, New Jersey. We specialize in transportation, supply chain, and warehouse management. Privately held and founded in 2008, Global Forwarding Enterprises has gained industry recognition for 5 years running as one of the fastest growing logistics companies in the industry. Our proprietary state-of-the-art technology optimizes global pricing, order placement and customized tracking. My position is Technical Lead

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire OpsWorks Co.?

OpsWorks Co. was hired as a System Administration party to support Globalforwarding offices.

SOLUTION

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

upWork

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

We referred all System Administration tasks to the OpsWorks Co. team: software for corporate computers set up and management, servers configuration and monitoring, etc. They performed everything via Teamviewer. The guys showed a high level of competence and great explanation skills. It was easy to cooperate with them.

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

I worked with Artem Dolobenko, he helped with complex \ architecture tasks, and his on call support team for the day to day tasks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

As a result of our cooperation, our IT infrastructure remains in good health and state. All requests were met on time, which helped us operate flawlessly.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Even though it was remote cooperation, we managed to remain in touch at all times via digital channels. The response time never exceeded 15 minutes which often saved us a lot of trouble.

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

What impressed us the most was explaining what has to be done very comprehensively and concisely. We've never had to ask for something twice, as well as never had issues with communication. Our teams worked closely.

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

Not that I'm aware of. Speaking of System Administration, OpsWorks Co. can be a reliable partner to companies of all kinds and sizes.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of a company that helps older adults in the US and Canada live in their homes independently, rather than moving into assisted living communities or hire 24/7 caregivers. We do that by addressing the needs of older adults and supporting the instrumental activities of daily living, such as mobility, meals, grocery management, medication management, billing management, and communicating with friends and family.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OpsWork Co.?

Initially, we needed to build a better deployment pipeline for the whole organization. Occasionally, our deployments failed, which caused the whole system to go down every month or so. OpsWork Co. helped us find DevOps support to build a better pipeline.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

At the beginning of the project, we worked with them extensively on research and discovery. Then they found two dedicated team members to support DevOps. Then they became a resource we could turn to if we run into trouble with our with our setup.

Around that time, we developed an emerging need for engineering resources. OpsWork Co. came in and saved the day by providing another resource to support our meal management solution segment.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with five people in total.

How did you come to work with OpsWork Co.?

We were working with another partner who had worked with OpsWork Co. before. They highly recommended them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2019 and the project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We haven’t had any outages in the last six months, which is amazing. It’s a huge improvement over what we had before. Working with them was totally worth it.

How did OpsWork Co. perform from a project management standpoint?

They are very professional. We communicated with their leadership team over email, but we worked directly with the team working on our project using Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were fast, efficient, and responsive. I couldn’t imagine the project going any better.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We have no complaints.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Anyone working with a contractor should clarify the problem they’re trying to address. Make sure your scope is well-defined and supported by the leadership team. It makes the process much easier for everyone.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of RuGeeks. We’re based in Moscow, Russia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OpsWorks Co.?

Our DevOps engineer left in 2020. Services like Ansible, Terraform, and TeamCity were working badly, and we’d lost access to parts of our infrastructure.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

OpsWorks Co. restored our password system and other components that were failing. Currently, they’re optimizing our infrastructure. We were renting infrastructure from AWS, for which we were paying $600–$800 per month. Our team was using this infrastructure just for software testing, and it stayed unused the rest of the time.

OpsWorks Co. set up the system so we can push a button when we need to do testing, and we’ll have all the infrastructure we need. When we’re finished with the testing, we’ll push another button and stop the payment to AWS.

We had no monitoring capabilities prior to the collaboration. OpsWorks Co.’s engineer set everything up. They set up TeamCity so we can deploy all software to our entire system by pushing one button.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with one DevOps engineer.

How did you come to work with OpsWorks Co.?

I looked for DevOps engineers on Upwork.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost so far is between $3,000–$4,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with OpsWorks Co. in December 2020, and we’ll continue the collaboration until the end of 2021.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

OpsWorks Co. has very good and highly-skilled professionals on their team. They’re based in Ukraine, which has excellent mathematics schools and IT developers. We also had the chance to choose the engineer we’d be working with, which other agencies we’ve tried didn’t allow. If I’m introducing a new member onto my team, I need to be sure that they can work together.

OpsWorks Co. has reduced our cost tenfold for renting infrastructure. DevOps is mainly about reducing infrastructure costs and optimizing business and technical processes. They’ve also reduced the number of customer tickets twofold.

Their engineer implemented a monitoring system for us as well as optimized our infrastructure and processes. If a customer has an issue, we can solve it as fast as possible. They created a portal for logging customer issues. We use it to understand what happened and to solve the problem.

How did OpsWorks Co. perform from a project management standpoint?

We haven’t used project management resources from OpsWorks Co. We discuss all issues and requests through our Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have good technical thinking. Our platform has a service architecture, and we need to be sure that the DevOps engineer won’t make any mistakes with it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’re working with them to reduce the price. I do understand that they provide only highly-skilled professionals, but we find the cost to be high. Secondly, their commercial and account services could be a bit faster. We needed a C++, Boost.Asio, and OpenSSL developer two months ago. OpsWorks Co. has developers but they’re only full-time. We needed a part-time resource, so we went to Upwork. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a tech startup that’s developing a social commerce platform. People and businesses can post photos, videos, and text as well as sell products and services on our platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OpsWorks Co.?

We needed to set up our Kubernetes cluster.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

At the beginning of the project, I gave them task descriptions and user stories, which basically described what their team needed to do stop by step. OpsWorks set up a Kubernetes staging and production cluster. Their team used multiple technologies, including Kubespray and Ansible for scripts. They deployed the entire application on this cluster. Their team provided frontend and backend services as well as an analytics stack. OpsWorks continues to support our infrastructure.

What is the team composition?

In the beginning, we worked with one senior DevOps engineer and then a mid-level engineer when the initial engineer was unavailable. A third engineer recently joined the project too.

How did you come to work with OpsWorks Co.?

OpsWorks applied to our post on Upwork. I reviewed them, investigating their website and Upwork profile. Both looked good. We interviewed other agencies, but OpsWorks’ engineers provided the best experience and offer.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent around €5,000 (approximately $6,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with OpsWorks in May 2020, and they continue to support our infrastructure.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

OpsWorks does a great job. Our infrastructure — staging and production — is up and running, so I’m quite happy. If we have a problem, they find a solution as soon as possible. Their team also quickly answers our questions.

How did OpsWorks Co. perform from a project management standpoint?

OpsWorks assigned a project manager to our account who’s always available and answers all of my questions. Their team efficiently handles all urgent requirements. For project management, they use Jira. To track time, their team uses Hubstaff.

We use Asana on our side and make use of Gitlab to manage the codebase. We have daily conversations through Skype and handle invoices and contract-related items through email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

OpsWorks is trustworthy and reliable, so we can count on them. They focus on their customers. For them, their customer is at the center of the engagement rather than the money.

Are there any areas they could improve?

OpsWorks should keep a fixed price structure. They changed payment and time tracking conditions. However, I understand their position of rising internal costs.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Talk to their CEO. He’s a fair and open person. Clients should demonstrate their expectations as clearly as possible to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a company that provides cloud-based fraud prevention solutions. Our system is API-based and runs on AWS. We gather information from clients and help them calculate risk scores for each transaction they make. We’ve built specific tools to enrich the data received from customers. In the case of email addresses and phone numbers, we can collect even more information from public sources all over the internet.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OpsWorks Co.?

We were looking for a company that could provide us with 24/7 technical support. Our main challenge was keeping our infrastructure online.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

OpsWorks Co. is monitoring our AWS infrastructure and helping us mitigate any issues. They provide 24/7 support. Their team registers incidents and either proposes or implements solutions. We also use their help to arrange DevOps tasks in our system. OpsWorks Co. acts as an expansion of our internal DevOps team.

What is the team composition?

As of now, they have more than eight people at our disposal, working in shifts. We always have at least two DevOps engineers available.

How did you come to work with OpsWorks Co.?

We found them on Upwork. Our team interviewed several companies providing similar services and chose OpsWorks Co. based on those interviews.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with OpsWorks Co. around November 2020, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re quite happy with OpsWorks Co.’s quality of service and response time. One of the most important things is that they react to incidents within minutes. Most other companies guarantee 15–30-minute response times, and OpsWorks Co. is below this threshold. They respond almost instantly when something happens in our system.

They’re proactive on our incidents and always help us resolve them. If we have an incident in the middle of the night, OpsWorks Co. will have already collected all the logs and contextual information. They do all of this in minutes, which is pretty amazing for us.

I can’t give the credit only to them, but they have a huge role in reducing the duration and frequency of our downtimes. We’ve successfully reduced the impact and number of incidents in our system. That’s a big success for us because the availability and reliability of our system are key. We’re working with payment gateways and online banks, so it’s crucial to keep the system online.

How did OpsWorks Co. perform from a project management standpoint?

Slack is our main communication tool, and we document cases in Jira. OpsWorks Co. has been quite flexible in adapting our tools and managing our project. We haven’t had difficulties in managing tasks and progress.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their response time and flexibility are two key differentiating factors, compared to all other candidates we reviewed. They don’t just provide monitoring services, OpsWorks Co. really strives to solve issues, and they recommend improvements proactively.

They’ve introduced new monitoring tools in our system and expanded detailed monitoring into all our application components. OpsWorks Co. has set up a bunch of alerts for this so we have a better understanding of what’s actually happening with our overall infrastructure. Of course, there’s the support role, where they help us mitigate issues. There are always new kinds of incidents that we need to figure out how to resolve. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the system architect of a SaaS firm. We’re a small organization with a team of five developers, a couple of consultants, project leaders, project managers, and one CEO. In my role, I work with designing the infrastructure for our SaaS product.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OpsWorks Co.?

We’re a small team and it’s mostly me who works on the infrastructure side. We needed some assistance to help monitor our system. We brought OpsWorks Co. on for support services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

OpsWorks Co. provides 24/7 support services. Their team members follow our monitoring system. They join parts of our VPN and get insight into our system. They’re constantly doing that, and we also provide documentation on what to do when certain situations happen. Sometimes, they’ll call me and other situations allow them to perform the task themselves.

Additionally, when the workload is heavy and I need some assistance, they step in to do some technical help. They provide a wide range of services. They’ve helped build out a VPN for our customers as well as built another monitoring dashboard. We primarily utilize them for backend needs and monitoring.

What is the team composition?

There are 12 people working with us on the support efforts. We’ve also worked with 4–5 other individuals for other projects.

How did you come to work with OpsWorks Co.?

We found them on Upwork. We decided to select them because they were a solid company.

How much have you invested with them?

On average, we spend about $2,000 a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started in May 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re happy to work with them and they do a great job. OpsWorks Co. is really fast and responsive. If we have any incidents, they respond immediately and follow documentation.

How did OpsWorks Co. perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been above average when it comes to meeting deadlines. It’s always hard to meet deadlines with technical work situations, and they’ve been excellent. We mostly communicate over Slack. Internally, we use Trello for managing our tasks. We’ve invited OpsWorks Co. to our Trello boards. Additionally, they have their own portal where we can add tickets.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s definitely their quality of work. OpsWorks Co. has a very impressive organization and they communicate really well. They’re professional and always stay on top of things. They’re always quick to answer my questions.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be open with communication. OpsWorks Co. is a great communicator so make sure you communicate well too.