Spaceport

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Dmitry, I am the CEO/Founder @ HireUkraine. We provide CRM/HRM/ job portal development and professional staffing services for technology companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Spaceport?

When we started developing our product, we built it to work on a virtual machine, as it was the most resource-efficient way of resource allocation at the moment. However, as Docker containers are now widely used, we wanted to future-proof our platform by making it run in containers and use REST-ful APIs.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to perform several tasks:

• Redesign our application to use RESTful APIs
• Split it to microservices that run in Docker containers to be able to support the ongoing growth of our product
• Enable simple and transparent container management

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We contacted lots of IT service providers from different countries and selected Spaceport based on their obvious technical expertise. They impressed us during a technical call and we decided to move with them.

Describe the project in detail.

As we have already said, we needed to rebuild our application to enable the use of RESTful APIs and split it to microservices able to run in Docker containers, while also enabling a straightforward and repeatable platform for container management.

What was the team composition?

We worked with a Project Manager, DevOps engineers and back-end developer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They were able to deliver everything we asked. Their developers had deep knowledge of the best ways to operate blockchain applications and splitting them into microservices for performance, and their DevOps engineers had a good understanding of the best way to organize the infrastructure for redundancy and scalability.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We discussed the sprint tasks daily and they reported on the progress daily through Slack and JIRA. We also held a weekly call with the PM and our executives to keep the hand on the pulse of the project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They have ample experience with projects of this kind, so they have ready solutions and polished workflows for getting the things done. They were able to offer a solution for every roadblock quite quickly and implement it flawlessly.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Their toolkit is not as wide as we would like — they did not use Docker Swarm, Rancher, Packer or Mesos/Marathon as we wanted them to. They used Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker and other popular open-source and platform-specific tools like Amazon CloudFormation.

I cannot say it is bad, though, as they explained the reasons behind this decision and these were pretty sound.