CUSTOMER BACKGROUND
PartsTech is a US-based start-up that helps auto repair shops find the right parts. The company provides an online platform that links repair shops with distributors and manufacturers. Working with a large network of suppliers, both locally & nationally, PartsTech enables one-stop shopping for their customers.
PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
PartsTech has a cloud-based infrastructure that enables their customers to look for products’ pricing and availability in real time. Needless to say that for their business to be successful everything should run like clockwork. Any infrastructure issue such as search not working or databases down could affect their customers and as a result, their sales.
Moreover, PartsTech planned to further grow their business, which meant the increasing number of customers and as such, more queries to process. That made the question of reliable infrastructure of paramount importance. Still, the company’s existing infrastructure could have hardly been called so: PartsTech struggled with major downtime issues every couple of months.
To make things worse, they couldn’t find a reliable system administrator who would oversee their infrastructure. At some point, as Olexy Sadovy, CTO at PartsTech recalls, they grew tired of this. So, when somebody from the PartsTech team recommended us, they were happy to get in touch and start working with SHALB.
WHY THEY CHOSE US
Having talked with Alexander Iatsuk, CEO at SHALB, Olexy Sadovy was pleased with our approach and the ways we suggested solving their problems:
Over 10 years of DevOps experience and extensive cloud expertise make SHALB engineers fully understand the customers’ needs and the space of their projects. We were happy to join hands with the PartsTech team to design the most optimal solution for them.
PROJECT DELIVERY
By the time PartsTech started working with SHALB, they already had a Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS, with clusters managed by kOps. However, as long as the clusters were self-hosted, it required manual management of Kubernetes masters (etcd, API) and backups, which significantly complicated cluster updates and often resulted in system downtimes. On top of that, the PartsTech infrastructure was not fully described in code. The codified pieces and Terraform documentation didn’t match the actual configuration, which made the infrastructure difficult to manage and reproduce.
As part of the project, SHALB engineers covered the whole PartsTech infrastructure with Terraform code and had it transitioned to managed EKS clusters. With AWS being responsible for cluster upgrades, the whole process became easier and more predictable. The EKS clusters were launched and provisioned by Cluster.dev – SHALB’s very own solution for infrastructure automation and management. Cluster.dev manages all necessary infrastructure used by EKS, such as IAM Roles, subnet tagging, and EC2-workers configuration.
To deploy the PartsTech infrastructure, we used one of the Cluster.dev stack templates and customized it according to the customer’s needs. Following the IaC approach, all working is done through the Cluster.dev infrastructure repository, ensuring the exact correspondence between the code and actual infrastructure.
PROJECT OUTCOME
Working with SHALB, PartsTech achieved their main goal: infrastructure reliability. According to Olexy Sadovy, the company had no major downtimes since the project implementation. Now, as PartsTech has a scalable and well-performing infrastructure, they are much more confident about their plans to grow the business. Olexy Sadovy says:
By transitioning the PartsTech infrastructure under Cluster.dev management we automated most of the infrastructure processes, this way minimizing human intervention and the chances of human errors. What is more, Cluster.dev templating enabled the PartsTech team to easily launch new environments for testing and development needs: with the cdev template it takes only a few minutes to spin up an infrastructure replica. Now they can have a production-ready EKS cluster with defined roles and provisioned worker nodes in less than an hour.
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
Commenting on the works done, Olexy Sadovy admits that they are pretty happy with the achieved results: PartsTech has done with infrastructure issues and got a reliable partner whose expertise they can trust. With SHALB teammates constantly sharing their knowledge and skills, PartsTech feels like they have access to the knowledge base of not just people they work with, but of all SHALB engineers as well. On top of that, they really appreciate the synergy of PartsTech and SHALB teams working together on solving issues.
Currently PartsTech keeps on collaborating with SHALB to maintain their new infrastructure. As for the project, it was not that much technically challenging rather than complex in terms of making things right:
Olexy Sadovy, CTO at PartsTech
The problem with our project was we had so many people working on it that it was very convoluted, – comments Olexy Sadovy. – So it was really hard to untangle all this mess. And I think SHALB did a great job of working with that. We had a couple of bumps but we got through that and I think we ended up on the good side of it.
Working on the PartsTech project proved how smoothly the transition from almost having no system administration to having some could be. Our engineers seamlessly integrate into your workflow and work as part of your in-house team to achieve better results.
So, if you have any problems with your existing infrastructure, don’t hesitate to contact us. Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com for more information. We’ll be happy to hear from you!
