Konnecto is a growing startup in the consumer intelligence space. The team and the product have both been growing steadily over the past few years. With that growth has come the need for increased dedicated DevOps and DataOps expertise.
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Konnecto is a growing startup in the consumer intelligence space. The team and the product have both been growing steadily over the past few years. With that growth has come the need for increased dedicated DevOps and DataOps expertise.
While working on the initial versions of the product, the Konnecto team didn’t feel the need for specialized DevOps expertise, despite only being a small team of developers.
“Before we started working with Opsfleet, we were a small team managing a very simple cloud infrastructure with a few cloud servers and without any CI/CD pipelines or automation.”
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
However, as the team continued to grow — and the product and Konnecto’s customers matured — the backlog of infrastructure and DevOps tasks started to pile up.
“At the time, I was doing most of the DevOps work. But at some point, I started to feel that I couldn’t allocate the required attention anymore. Instead of being reactive, we wanted to improve how we worked and released code, create a better CI/CD pipeline, and improve our overall development methodology.”
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
Naturally, the Konnecto team thought about hiring a DevOps engineer in-house, but they faced a few challenges — it was hard for them to find qualified candidates, and they soon discovered that the compensation level of a senior DevOps engineer that fit the team's high standards was above budget at the time.
That’s when Konnecto’s management team asked for a recommendation to a local DevOps professional services company, and got introduced to Opsfleet by one of the company’s past clients.
Since the Konnecto team needed a combination of implementation and advisory services, Opsfleet offered a bundled “DevOps-As-A-Service” package, which included part-time access to a senior implementation engineer along with the management and advisory services provided by Opsfleet’s team leaders.
“We loved the dynamic nature of the “DevOps-As-A-Service” offer — we could scale up or down the implementation capacity based on our backlog and budget while retaining the Opsfleet team leads around to help with advisory and architecture design.”
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
“We were also happy to discover that the hiring process was very quick. Within a few weeks, our team had a few short discovery meetings after which we finalized the legal details and had our dedicated Opsfleet team assembled and ready to go.”
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
Konnecto and Opsfleet have now been working together for more than 2 years. During this time the team has accomplished many important infrastructure projects together.
One major improvement has been the transition of the infrastructure from a few manually-managed EC2 machines, to a fully automated and autoscaled Kubernetes environment.
The management of Konnecto’s AWS accounts was fully transitioned to Terraform. Multiple Kubernetes clusters were created to separate between production and non-production environments, and long-running workloads from short-term jobs managed with Argo workflows.
Konnecto’s CI and CD pipelines were also created from scratch and evolved over time. Today, the team uses Helmfile and CircleCI to drive the release of most of the changes across dev and production environments. Recently, the team started to use a monorepo approach for some of the web applications, successfully adapting the CI/CD pipelines to the new workflow.
MongoDB is also an essential part of Konnecto’s infrastructure and hosts TBs of data. The team started with a managed MongoDB service, however, decided that self-hosting MongoDB would be more cost-effective. In addition, the Opsfleet team worked with Konnecto on query performance optimizations, managing to reduce the average query time by 80%.
“We’d had a lot of bad experiences working with outside contractors before. We also were concerned about the dedication of someone who wasn’t part of our team. Opsfleet were the first success we had working with a professional services company, and by far!”.
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
In addition to important technical milestones, the Opsfleet team also provided foundational knowledge that Konnecto’s team will continue to build upon and improve as they grow:
“I love the fact that by working with Opsfleet I was able to develop and improve my personal DevOps skills. Your team members provided us with great documentation and training that helped us improve our development practices.”
Tom Slabbaert, Chief Architect
“Both Sergey and Gennady were great engineers who aren’t just good implementers but were also actively involved in critical design decisions related to cloud infrastructure and development methodologies”.
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