OpsWorks Co.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Davintoo Ukraina LLC is a software development company. We create IT solutions for training and assessment of employees, internal communications, data analysis, e-learning, and implementation of e-learning platforms in the company's IT environment. Our main product is LMS Collaborator – an e-learning web-platform. My position is CTO

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

We were seeking a consultancy company to help us build a Kubernetes cluster.

What were your goals for this project?

The main goal was to migrate our LMS SaaS instances from bare-metal servers to the Kubernetes cluster.

How did you select OpsWorks Co.?

We found OpsWorks Co. among other contractors on Upwork. The OpsWorks Co. team has passed the interview and has been selected to be our DevOps services provider.

Describe the project in detail.

Our initial goal was to make our application more available and easier to scale. With this in mind, the OpsWorks Co. team has built a Kubernetes cluster that made the application management process easier and more comfortable. Later, with Hetzner’s instance solution, we managed to implement a cost reduction solution and scale whenever and how much ever we needed.

This allowed us to concentrate on application development more. DevOps engineers from OpsWorks Co. have also adopted a new monitoring, logging solution, and the back-up system that eventually boosted the platform performance. We have been cooperating with OpsWorks Co. for over two years now, and we are highly satisfied with their performance.

What was the team composition?

Since OpsWorks Co. follows a team approach, the allocated team included:

• two DevOps Engineers,
• CTO/Solutions Architect
• a Project Manager.

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

• We achieved higher application availability due to the scaling solution based on Kubernetes cluster implementation.
• The back-up system allowed us to boost our application performance
• We can cut expense on our infrastructure maintenance due to a sensible scaling solution

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication was very effective. We did regular meetings, after discussions, I described tasks in Jira. When any task was done by engineers it was verified and approved by the team lead from OpsWorks.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Job quality and professional skills level.These guys are known to do their job pretty good

Are there any areas for improvement?

I have no ideas about what else can do better

Please describe your company and your position there.

We're the prime solution partner for Banks and other Sellside firms for Digital Asset and Crypto Execution Management in addition to its leading position as the first fully-integrated algorithmic trading software solution for quantitative hedge and crypto funds on the Buyside.

Our Digital Asset and Crypto Execution Management platform allows Banks and the Sellside to seamlessly connect with the largest set of liquidity providers to ensure consistent best-price execution.

In addition, our solution allows for trading automation and execution of complex, quantitative trading strategies in both traditional Asset classes and Digital Asset classes. We provide everything a typical quantitative trading firm needs to run its operation on a daily basis.

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

The Contractor undertakes to provide the Customer with the following Services:

• Server administration / network infrastructure 
• Information security

What were your goals for this project?

High quality and reliable service for our global DevOps Infrastructure

How did you select OpsWorks Co.?

Through references and recommendations OpsWorks stood out and was a primary choice

Describe the project in detail.

For our global development we need someone handling the infrastructure for all the environments, demo VM, Jenkins jobs etc. We need someone answering quickly and solving all challenges reliably

What was the team composition?

We just hired one person

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

• Excellent work
• Quick response
• Taking responsibility for task and getting things done
• No problem to work outside the regular hours when needed, also doing updates on weekends
• Very cooperative and great know-how

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective, we are very pleased

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We're impressed by their consistent level of high-quality work.

Are there any areas for improvement?

none at this stage, any feedback we gave was taken seriously and implemented right away

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a leading IoT company that operates in hospitality industry and uses artificial intelligence technology.

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

We were seeking a consultancy company to help us boost our IT infrastructure automation, implement and IaC, and build robust continuous delivery pipeline.

What were your goals for this project?

Our initial goal was to make the application components redundant and isolated, build a fault-tolerant IT infrastructure, and automate deployment process and development routine.

What made us hire a DevOps contractor was frequent system failures and dependency between all Docker containers that made our infrastructure hard to manage and scale.

Containers communicated between each other via the internal channels, they weren't isolated, and they depended on each other. Thus, if one of the components was lacking or fell down, the system would fail.

How did you select this vendor?

The OpsWorks Co. team has passed the interview and has been selected to be our DevOps services provider.

Describe the project in detail.

OpsWorks Co. made four steps towards building a reusable and automated infrastructure:

1. Microservice Architecture Development

The main issue that caused system failures was a Docker compose file, which stored the whole 10-component application with dependencies between containers. When one component failed within one instance, all the others followed its lead.

Now each component is in a separate Docker container in a completely isolated environment. All containers operate on AWS ECS. Unlike an AWS EC2 instance, AWS ECS is a cluster that can contain hundreds of servers under the load balancer. Thus, the 10-component application migrated from the AWS EC2 to AWS elastic container service (AWS ECS).

As a result, our developers don't spend time on deploying a new version of the app manually. With AWS ECS it can be done automatically by pressing one button on the Jenkins dashboard.

2. IaC Implementation and Environment Automation

The OpsWorks Co. team developed a set of scripts that allows the system to scale up and down depending on its needs.

As a result, they automated the infrastructure deployment on AWS ECS. Now our team spends no time on creating and deploying new clusters — the scripts on Terraform and Ansible do it for them.

Implementing the IaC approach to automation made our infrastructure more flexible. Now, our team can:

• Apply a variety of coding best-practices to the infrastructure
• Validate each change to a module through code reviews and automated tests
• Create versioned releases of each module and document the changes in each release
• Try out different versions of a module in different environments
• Roll back to previous versions if there is an issue

3. CI/CD Implementation

The OpsWorks Co. team set up Jenkins and a CI/CD Pipeline to automate the routine work of software development. Now, there is no need to stop an old docker image and start a new one manually; this can be done with one button in the Jenkins dashboard.

4. Unit-testing Integration

Along with software deployment automation, they integrated unit tests in the developers' everyday work. Now, as all changes to the code make it to the production automatically, they should pass proper testing.

This is why our developers include unit tests in their code not to let a faulty feature make it to production. Unit-testing helps to avoid unexpected application failures due to new commits to the source code. They were written by our team, OpsWorks Co. integrated them into the CI/CD Pipeline.

What was the team composition?

Since OpsWorks Co. follows a team approach. The allocated team included three DevOps Engineers, along with the help from DevOps Team Lead, CTO, and a Project Manager.

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

Reusable and automated infrastructure due to the IaC approach implementation. Automatic container orchestration system based on AWS ECS. Automated CI/CD pipelines thanks to Jenkins implementation for every service (container). Automatically and independently scaling microservices.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

OpsWorks Co. allocated a senior team. In a short period, we could fully use AWS infrastructure with the integrated AWS Container Service (ECS). OpsWorks Co. helped us implement monitoring\alert system, automated day-to-day routines, made services highly-available and scalable, which was critical for us.

They configured CI\CD pipelines for our development process and followed IaC (infrastructure as code) principles - everything now in Terraform and Ansible. Millions of people around the world use our software.

We wanted to make sure that everything works fine. Logging aggregation and analytic solutions were implemented to follow these objectives. OpsWorks team also worked on security\access enhancement of our cloud infrastructure.

They also assisted us in applying new solutions, like self-service dynamic testing environments.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Team dedication

Are there any areas for improvement?

N/A

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The business is RocketEffect. We work in the industry of family entertainment businesses, such as trampolines, attraction parks, racing karts, etc. I’m the product manager.

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

We needed help with a web application we had built. It needed some infrastructure work done, and automation.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped build out the app for infrastructure optimization and automation.The app is integrated into the WordPress websites of our clients. There are special architectures of the app.

They based the infrastructure on AWS. They also used Jenkins, Prometheus, and other technologies for monitoring, coding, etc. They are currently working on updates and customizations, such as change requests for clients.

What is the team composition?

There are two developers and a manager. Sometimes there is a general manager that gets involved.

How did you come to work with OpsWorksCo.?

I did a Google search, as well as looked at them on Clutch and Upwork.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent roughly $28,000. It was $12,000 initially, and then $2,000-$3,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in May 2019, and it’s ongoing. We finished the main portion of the project in September 2019.

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

Before working with them, there was no automation at all. Based on the current solution, it takes roughly 25 minutes for deployment rather than the 2-3 hours it took before. They have saved us tremendous amounts of time. Our developers are very happy with the outcome, and our team is deeply interwoven with them on this project.

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

They do a very good job and accomplish work within their estimated timelines. We have weekly calls and updates on features. We use Microsoft Teams for project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are predictable and straightforward in terms of what is expected. They gave very reasonable estimates initially, and they turned out to be pretty accurate.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to prepare the requirements and discuss it in detail with them. Rely on their advice.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Content Analytics​, a subsidiary of Syndigo, is a leading eСommerce optimization platform for brands. The company's system helps brands to appear first among millions of SKUs available online. E-Commerce brands can store, catalog, and syndicate content to optimize their business and increase sales.

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

Content Analytics expected to have its development process and infrastructure optimized. The initial request included:

• Cloud services cost reduction
• Routine processes automation 
• Easily manageable cloud-based ecosystem construction
• Deployment time reduction and failure minimization
• Decrease time-to-market of the released features
• Higher website performance.

What were your goals for this project?

Content Analytics has been spending enormous sums on their infrastructure maintenance. We cooperating with OpsWorks Co. having one primary goal — to reduce expenses on cloud services.

How did you select this vendor?

We found them through UpWork and their website: https://opsworks.co/

Describe the project in detail.

The OpsWorks Co team helped us migrate of the servers to Oracle. Content Analytics got a special offer from Oracle Corporation for servers hosting with the initial configuration. Since the migration to Oracle, the price for cloud services has dropped fourfold. Migrating the CA infrastructure to Kubernetes consequently simplified the management of the servers. Also, OpsWorks Co. used Jenkins to optimize and advance the infrastructure. They implemented a monitoring and logging system based on Grafana, Prometheus, and ELK Stack to predict and prevent outages.

What was the team composition?

Four DevOps engineers

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

We have accomplished hundreds of tasks and consequently made significant changes to improve the infrastructure. The main improvements include:

1. Deployment time reduction from 30 to 5 minutes by virtue of ​optimizing and improving deployment scripts and processes
2. Fourfold costs reduction due to databases migration from RDS to Azure
3. No routine job owing to automated on the production and testing stages
4. Shorter time-to-market and improved customer satisfaction due to automating and optimizing CI/CD Pipeline.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We maintain close communication between our teams.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Get the job done, dedication and ownership

Are there any areas for improvement?

none

Please describe your company and your position there.

High Voltage SEO is a bespoke SEO firm with locations in Melbourne, Berlin, and Phoenix, that provides a personalized SEO optimization strategy for the companies. I’m a the US Manager.

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

App migration to AWS & HDD server’s auto backups

What were your goals for this project?

Our general goal was to reach better results with our web app.

The aims were:

• make a faster procession of requests
• audit, improve and maintain infrastructure
• establish proper security on the servers
• make backups of data.

Availability under high load is crucial for us.

How did you select this vendor?

We looked for a team at Upwork, where OpsWorks Co was the most qualified vendor for our tech stack and perfectly matched our project goals.

Describe the project in detail.

OpsWork's team helped us migrate our app and the main website to the new server on AWS. They provided us with solutions for auto backups of HDD servers. A very important thing for us it's secured servers with ssh and implemented a fail2ban. Huge improvements and results were achieved.

What was the team composition?

We are working with a PM manager and a team of engineers.

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

We reduced revenue loss and performance degradation related to data backups. Disaster recovery activities were implemented. Eventually, the website and server stability was improved.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It is effective. We receive fast responses to our inquiries and well-build communication.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We find our cooperation with OpsWorks Co. very successful as finally, we are able to use our capabilities in full. We're impressed by their ability to find proper approaches to each issue that popped up during upgrading our infrastructure.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As for now, the team performs a supporting activity on our system, and we completely satisfied with it.