Bizzabo is the world’s fastest growing event technology company. Their SaaS platform empowers event marketers all over the world to build websites, sell tickets and maximize event experiences with their holistic and user-friendly platform. It’s used by thousands of conference organizers to manage, measure and grow professional events.
The company wanted to transition away from its static development and production environments.
Having a static development environment for each of their development teams caused a bottleneck effect because team members frequently couldn’t work simultaneously in the same environment. Adding new development environments was a time-consuming task. Additionally, the machines for these environments were running 24/7, which drove up costs.
On the production side, scaling resources to meet customer demand could only be done manually.
With our fast-growing customer base, we need to have more resources available for them. We didn’t have a way to do this automatically and had to do a lot of manual work to add resources based on what we thought the demand would be. A big event could cause a lot of stress on our production system. In one case, our system went down because a large event ended up with almost double the expected number of attendees and we had to spend a lot of time to fix it. We knew we needed to make our system more scalable.
Alex Fainshtein, Backend Team Lead
We were initially concerned about working with someone who wasn’t part of our team on a core system and how well the outcome would turn out. But we knew this project required specialized outside knowledge. Opsfleet came recommended to us and had previous experience doing similar projects, so that gave us reassurance this would be an effective engagement. Our initial discussions were very pleasant and professional. We could see they knew what they were doing and could save a lot of mistakes from being made that would affect us down the road.
Alex Fainshtein, Backend Team Lead
We helped Bizzabo modernize their infrastructure by migrating their production and development environments to Kubernetes. We started by transitioning their development environment to dynamic namespaces on Kubernetes, running on spot instances. We set it up so each developer has their own environment on a shared cluster, which automatically scales up and down based on usage.
We then migrated their production environment to Kubernetes, to allow it to scale automatically to meet demand. With a very large customer event on the horizon, we prepared the infrastructure and ran performance tests to ensure it would automatically meet big spikes in demand without service interruptions.
We worked closely with the development team, training them on how to handle operations on the system and to take advantage of the full productivity benefits the tools offer.
The best thing about working with Opsfleet was the collaborative mindset. We felt like they were part of our team and not just here for a project. The knowledge handover was deep and super professional.
Boaz Katz, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer
The project gave us a lot of tools and knowledge that we didn’t have before. I had a ton of questions and Leonid was happy to answer all of them, even after the project ended. Our team gained a lot of knowledge in a very short time from working with Opsfleet.
Alex Fainshtein, Backend Team Lead
We also helped advise the company on the hiring of a new DevOps employee.
Our new DevOps employee is giving our team more technical depth. He is enjoying the outcomes of this project because he can take his time to do more advanced things for the development team that will enable us to do more.
Alex Fainshtein, Backend Team Lead
As a result of our work together, Opsfleet helped Bizzabo reduce costs and downtime.
After the project, we could update our uptime SLA from 99.95% to 99.98%. We saved around 30% in immediate cost reduction and could handle more than double the traffic on the same cost.
Boaz Katz, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer
Bizzabo can now scale production resources automatically according to their needs. Large events using Bizzabo’s platform shortly after migration, including Hubspot’s Inbound Conference, have successfully run on the platform without issue. The changes to the development environment have not only saved dollars, but also made things easier for the development team.
This project saved us a lot of time and money. I think a lot of the developers don’t even remember how the development environment was before and it has been great for productivity. Also, moving from on-demand machines to spot instances allows us to pay much less for them.We now only pay for what we need in the production environment, so that also saves us money. We’ve achieved the scalability we wanted because the system knows how to add more resources automatically when there is an increase in traffic. We had a great success with large events since we migrated the infrastructure. The events have gone smoothly with no need for intervention from us. We can sleep well at night now knowing that the system can handle all this traffic.