OpsWorks Co.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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

We needed to set up our Kubernetes cluster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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