BigPanda Case Study

We started with a review of BigPanda's old development process and reviewed their attempts to switch the dev environment to Kubernetes. They had set the environment up so that all processes had to be run locally.

We proposed a new architecture in which most of the application would run on a remote shared Kubernetes cluster. We suggested Telepresence for creating a transparent two-way proxy so developers can work with remote applications as if they are running locally.

Leo came with a very clear plan for how the platform would look and how Opsfleet intended to build everything. He came very prepared, knew exactly what he was going to do, and was very good at explaining it to us.

Shahar Kedar, former VP of Engineering, BigPanda

We helped the team clean up their Dockerfiles and improve their CI to automatically build and publish the Docker images for all applications. We created Helm charts for each application and created a few utility scripts so developers could operate the system autonomously.

Within a month, we had the dev environment up and running on Kubernetes. We traveled to BigPanda's offices to train the team, and we recorded the session so it can be an ongoing asset to orient new team members. Shahar says one of the more intangible benefits of the project was a motivation boost for the engineers on the team.

I could see that everyone on my team was hyped when Opsfleet presented the solution and showed us how to work with the new Kubernetes and the new features. The team was thrilled to have a faster way to work; they knew this speed would help the company do great things. Everyone was happy that they could stop learning the Kubernetes platform and start using it every day.

Shahar Kedar, former VP of Engineering, BigPanda

To minimize the impact on the development team, we rolled out access to the new development environment slowly, starting with a few team members. We fixed bugs and added to the automation scripts, repeating this process until all were satisfied with the results. We also built the development environment in such a way that its building blocks can be reused for the production environment.

With the migration complete, the BigPanda engineering team has already seen great improvements. The new dev environment has replaced the previous environment—and improved on it. BigPanda can now shift from noncontainerized services to fully containerized services running on a top-of-the-line container-orchestration platform.

My experience with Opsfleet is that within a few months, we had a stable dev environment built on top of Kubernetes and it included a lot of features that the environments we'd built ourselves didn’t have. Opsfleet’s work definitely improved how we develop our service. Our new dev environment will enable us to scale much more easily and with higher velocity than before.

Shahar Kedar, former VP of Engineering, BigPanda

Now that it’s so easy to add new services to the environment, BigPanda's developers work more efficiently. They have fewer complaints about the development workflow and have even been able to test some very urgent features on the new platform with minimal preparation and minimal operations-team involvement.

Opsfleet helped BigPanda's development team level up their expertise in Kubernetes. The team is now operating the development environment completely on their own and plan to take the same setup to production without needing much support from Opsfleet.

The groundwork is now set for BigPanda to achieve a major goal: migrate out of the California zone to a region with better AWS support.

We needed to easily provision environments from scratch on different data centers in different regions. Opsfleet helped provide a vital building block that will eventually allow us to migrate out of our main AWS region.

Shahar Kedar, former VP of Engineering, BigPanda

Shahar says he particularly appreciates the professionalism and flexibility Opsfleet provides as well as our ability to understand both the operational and business sides of an organization.