Multi-Region Without the Hassle

SAFE Health is a Digital Health and Connected Diagnostics Marketplace Platform that is operated in partnership with the Mayo Clinic. With SAFE, organizations can launch digital health apps in weeks – helping to triage low-acuity health issues through digital diagnostics, provider teleconferencing, integrated prescription delivery, and more.

Before moving to Control Plane in 2021, SAFE’s infrastructure was built on AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), using KNative to provide the efficiency benefits of serverless without the limitations of Lambda. SAFE also maintained an event plane using NATS.io through NGS, a machine learning layer, and several databases (S3, NoSQL, Big Query, etc.).cplnbreakThis infrastructure was implemented on a single region of AWS, but Dimy Jeannot, SAFE’s CTO, knew that as the company grew, they would need to expand to multiple regions very soon. Implementing Istio as a service mesh for multiple Kubernetes clusters was the obvious way to address the challenge, but finding DevOps engineers who were versed not only in Kubernetes but also in the high- order thinking that Istio required was a huge obstacle. SAFE recruited nationwide but struggled to find even one or two of the 10-15 highly-specialized engineers Jeannot knew would be required to build and manage a multi-region infrastructure.cplnbreakIn the process of addressing this issue, Jeannot spoke to Jim Nasr, the former Chief Software Architect of the Centers for Disease Control and the current CEO of Acoer. Acoer had been using Control Plane for several months, and Nasr suggested that it might be a great solution for SAFE as well. By that point, Jeannot had found a single DevOps engineer, but by moving to Control Plane was able to avoid the time and expense of 10+ additional hires. Safe Health worked with [APrime](https://aprime.io), a Control Plane implementation partner who assisted in a smooth transition to the Control Plane Platform.

A Shortage of Talent and Time

SafeHealth

Dimy Jeannot

SAFE Health’s team of 80 engineers ran 9 environments in AWS delivering reliable service to their customers. As of today, all but one of those environments has been moved to Control Plane.cplnbreak Jeannot was surprised by how smoothly the migration went. Normally, moving production environments is a long and frustrating ordeal but the move to Control Plane has been shockingly non-eventful.cplnbreak Most of the benefits of the migration to Control Plane have accrued to internal operational improvements – the ability to do more faster at less cost – but what SAFE’s customers may notice is the increased pace of innovation and responsiveness enabled by new engineers focused on customer problems who might otherwise be dedicated to infrastructure.

Anticlimactic Migration

For the SAFE Health engineering team, the results of using Control Plane have been immediate and dramatic. Not only has SAFE been able to continue its meteoric growth without hiring an army of DevOps engineers and SREs, but they have also been able to decrease their cloud costs by 75%.cplnbreak Where these savings come from is both simple and complicated. On the one hand, the cost of compute on Control Plane is less for SAFE because the company uses Control Plane’s proprietary Capacity AI technology to scale workloads to zero when not in use or near-zero for workloads they cannot afford to cold-start. On the other hand, much of the company’s AWS cost was incurred not by compute (which could be scaled to some degree) but by VPNs, gateways, load balancers, and other services which they could neither scale nor turn off when not in use. Many of these services are available as part of the Control Plane platform for no additional cost.

Reducing Cloud Costs

One of the primary benefits of the move to Control Plane, is that an environment (a Global Virtual Cloud, or GVC) can be provisioned with any number of regions without increasing the complexity of the environment. This flexibility to add and subtract regions helps SAFE not only by ensuring consistently low latency across customer locations, but also by giving SAFE control over jurisdiction (where compute takes place and where data is stored) - an important regulatory issue in the healthcare industry.cplnbreakControl Plane also accommodates SAFE’s zero-trust policy by enabling developer and workload permissions to be managed granularly. As an example, SAFE uses Synadia NGS (managed NATS.io) as its “nervous system” and would ordinarily have to embed credentials in each workload that communicates with the NGS service. However, using Control Plane’s Universal Cloud Identity, SAFE can associate one or more identities in Control Plane to their NGS account which enables workloads to communicate natively. This not only reduces the burden on SAFE developers but also enables top-down administrative control over the permissions of each developer and each workload.

Multi-Region & Multicloud

SAFE Health has utilized Control Plane to enable its expansion to a multi-region infrastructure, which has translated to faster innovation and direct customer value.

Summary

SAFE Health is a Digital Health and Connected Diagnostics Marketplace Platform that is operated in partnership with the Mayo Clinic. With SAFE, organizations can launch digital health apps in weeks – helping to triage low-acuity health issues through digital diagnostics, provider teleconferencing, integrated prescription delivery, and more.cplnbreak The SAFE app can be white-labeled and customized extensively to integrate the insurance, provider, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical preferences of their customers.cplnbreak To protect patient privacy, SAFE is built on a zero-trust architecture, exacting strict controls on each workload and enforcing the principle of least privilege for each engineer contributing to the application.

Control and Flexibility for Growth

Upsie provides customers with a better warranty option for electronic devices than plans sold by stores and manufacturers. With prices that cost up to 70% less, quick repairs, and fantastic customer service, Upsie is the smarter way to warranty.

When Jame Mackson joined Upsie in 2019 as Head of Engineering, one of his first decisions was to migrate the company’s tech stack from a .Net-based backend hosted on Azure to Node.js hosted on Heroku. Heroku made sense at the time. It automated and abstracted a lot of the devops grunt work Mackson had spent months building out in past positions and allowed the Upsie engineering team to focus on business logic and solving customer problems.cplnbreakHowever, as the company – and the infrastructure supporting it – grew, the choice to use Heroku began to look less obvious. Upsie’s Heroku bill had already grown to be substantial and even though they were on an Enterprise pricing tier, sticking to their infrastructure roadmap was soon going to ratchet their cloud cost by as much as 100%.cplnbreakMackson didn’t mind paying Heroku to get better time to market, but he wasn’t comfortable with the compromise escalating costs created as Upsie grew.cplnbreakWith this dilemma top of mind, Upsie began looking for alternatives and began evaluating Control Plane. Mackson was skeptical at first, but technical due diligence confirmed that Control Plane could meet Upsie’s requirements while providing a substantial cost savings. The team soon began migrating workloads from Heroku to Control Plane.

Managing Cloud Spend and Scale

Upsie

Jame Mackson

Upsie is currently single cloud, so while Mackson saw the cross-cloud capabilities Control Plane offers as a great option in the future to increase resiliency, he sees the greatest value in the platform’s ability to deliver an elegant developer experience while enabling greater control over how Upsie’s infrastructure consumes resources.cplnbreakWhile Heroku’s pricing tiers forced Upsie to choose between four different “dyno” sizes, Control Plane enables them to scale usage linearly and elastically. This increased runtime efficiency is one of the biggest advantages for Upsie because it translates directly to cost savings.cplnbreakCurrently, Upsie runs compute on Control Plane and a data tier natively on AWS. According to Upsie, this combination has paired nicely and given them the control and flexibility they need to grow.

Control Plane Results

Mackson has also been very impressed with the level of support he’s received from Control Plane, both for day-to-day issues as well as special requests.

World-Class Support

Control Plane has enabled Upsie to stay focused on business logic and customer experience even while growing quickly by giving them fine-grained control over how their infrastructure consumes cloud resources. This enables them to be fast and cost-efficient without cutting corners.

Upsie provides customers with a better warranty option for electronic devices than plans sold by stores and manufacturers. With prices that cost up to 70% less, quick repairs, and fantastic customer service, Upsie is the smarter way to warranty.cplnbreakTo deliver on this mission, Upsie maintains a backend API and two web applicationscplncolon upsie.com for ecommerce and an internal administration site.

Multicloud That's Flexible and Fast

The machinery and technologies used on the farm to grow crops increasingly grow data also – whether the GPS track of a planter, the fuel consumption of a combine, or the average tons-per-acre of a spreader. For most farms, even large ones, this data is too fragmented and siloed to be useful to the grower – or anyone else for that matter.

The CTO of Verdova, Max Feinberg, worked at NASA earlier in his career on the Astrobee – a free-flying robotic system designed to help astronauts with routine tasks, freeing them up for more strategic duties. In the aerospace industry, product releases required months of pre-planning, with substantial buffer zones for deployment. However, even years after leaving NASA, Feinberg found himself allocating a week or two of each cycle to deployment and stressing over all the things that could go wrong.cplnbreakThis stress was compounded by the fact that Verdova was using services from AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure. For them, the arrangement allowed them to choose best-of-breed services, but was complex. The choice to use GCP was driven by the need to analyze incredibly large geospatial datasets – a task for which Google’s Big Query was the only viable option.cplnbreakThe real issue, though, was not the stress but the time. Feinberg didn’t have a dedicated DevOps team and whatever time and effort he and his engineers put toward infrastructure was time taken away from customer-facing functionality, improved data cleansing, and deeper analytics.cplnbreakThis led Feinberg on a hunt to find the DevOps equivalent of Astrobee – a system that would handle the routine tasks so his team could focus on the important stuff.

The Search for a DevOps Robot

Verdova

Max Feinberg

Verdova was an early adopter of Control Plane. Feinberg knew from painful experience both how much time DevOps tasks can consume as well as how different they can be between clouds. Verdova systematically tested Control Plane on a workload-by- workload basis and finally settled on an arrangement whereby their API and front-end applications are hosted in Control Plane and access RDS (where most of Verdova’s data is stored), S3, SQS, and Lambda in AWS and Big Query in GCP.cplnbreakControl Plane’s Universal Cloud Identity makes this hybrid multicloud architecture much easier to build and maintain. Verdova assigns a Control Plane identity to their workloads that is connected to the security policies of their cloud accounts, allowing the workload to access any service from any of their cloud accounts - whether an S3 object, an RDS database, or an SQS queue. This eliminates the need to embed and maintain credentials within each workload. Additionally, Verdova uses Control Plane’s Cloud Wormhole to give their workloads access to certain RDS databases running inside of VPCs.cplnbreakFeinberg has also appreciated the suite of Day-2 ops tools which Control Plane provides – from connecting a domain, to managing certificates, to the fact that Prometheus and Grafana are already integrated and ready to use. Even for an experienced DevOps engineer, these tasks can easily eat up days of valuable time and for a developer without expertise might eat a week or more.

Flexibility of Multicloud Without the Hassle

Verdova is partnered with a carbon credit marketplace, enabling them to precisely measure the amount of carbon sequestered on participating farms. Part of the marketplace's team is located in Lviv, Ukraine, far from the corn fields of Illinois. Even before the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, delivering low latency data from Verdova to the marketplace proved to be difficult. By enabling availability zones in Control Plane that are geographically close to this remote team, Verdova has been able to minimize latency and enable this partner to successfully consume Verdova's data even with suboptimal internet.

Availability Close to Customers

The utilization of Verdova’s API is highly variable. Periods of low utilization may be punctuated by periods of extremely high utilization when multiple clients request large or complex datasets. Control Plane enables Verdova to scale capacity up and down smoothly without the increased load affecting the quality of their services. Additionally, since Control Plane automatically adjusts the resources available based on load, Verdova is able to offer a high service level to their customers without over-provisioning. The capacity is there when they need it but it does not consume budget when they do not.

Scalability Without Over-Provisioning

Verdova has found using Control Plane to be very straightforward even for members of the team without DevOps experience. However, some workloads are inherently complex and require special consideration. Verdova has been “shocked” by the Control Plane team’s responsiveness and expertise when they need support. In one such instance, the company was deploying Apache Airflow, which required several containers and advanced configuration. The Control Plane team offered prompt answers and hands-on help to set up Airflow properly.

Surprising Support - In a Good Way

Verdova enables growers to benefit from the mountains of data their machinery and equipment generate. Control Plane facilitates this model by enabling Verdova to easily combine and configure cloud services and resources from AWS, GCP, and Azure into a highly-available, low latency infrastructure. Furthermore – like a DevOps Astrobee – Control Plane handles the routine tasks so their team can focus on strategic problems.

The machinery and technologies used on the farm to grow crops increasingly grow data also – whether the GPS track of a planter, the fuel consumption of a combine, or the average tons-per-acre of a spreader. For most farms, even large ones, this data is too fragmented and siloed to be useful to the grower – or anyone else for that matter.cplnbreakVerdova works with growers to aggregate data, cleanse and process it into meaningful data products valuable to buyers up and down the agricultural value chain, and return 85% of the proceeds back to the grower as an alternative revenue source.cplnbreakTo serve their growing customer base, Verdova stores and cleanses large volumes of macro-level and micro-level agricultural data ingested from the systems and applications used by growers and presents this data through an API and frontend applications.

Scaling an Education Platform Securely

Subject is an accredited learning platform that empowers school districts to deliver quality education to any learner – augmenting a district’s existing educators. The company is addressing a huge problem in the current education system, and one made even more pressing by the pandemiccplncolon how to deliver equal educational opportunities amid vast inequalities in socioeconomic status, district resources, and educator staffing.

The large and growing demand for solutions which help to level the educational playing field has kept Subject’s growth at a rapid clip but in order to continue this level of expansion, Subject must also maintain strict security controls for district compliance and student privacy. Additionally, Subject’s platform must deliver relatively low latency and high availability for students and educators.cplnbreakScale, security, and availability, however, are merely table stakes. For Subject to deliver successful educational experiences to its students, it must create a fine-tuned user experience – one that’s obsessively-focused on the student’s learning outcomes. This level of focus is hard to maintain while also addressing core infrastructure requirements.

Staying Focused on Student Outcomes

Subject

Nantana Minale

Subject began using Control Plane almost from the beginning of their journey after initially considering implementing Kubernetes clusters in both GCP and AWS. The company is currently using AWS for video processing and hosts their frontend applications on Vercel. Subject’s backend is deployed on Control Plane running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and these workloads are backed by a Postgres database hosted natively on GCP. Control Plane has allowed Subject to address a number of key challenges they face as a young and growing company.

A Foundation for Growth

Subject wanted the flexibility to choose the best cloud for the job – and they had multiple jobs to perform. When Subject was first starting out, this push for flexibility had the added benefit of allowing the company to take advantage of credits offered by multiple cloud providers. Control Plane interfaces with disparate infrastructure, enabling Subject to deploy to GCP while connecting easily with other cloud services – with flexibility for the future to use multiple regions of multiple clouds.

Choosing the Best Tool for the Job

Subject is progressing toward SOC2 certification, which will give them an advantage when working with larger, security-sensitive school districts. Control Plane’s complete audit trail of every developer action along with functionality for fine-grained access control moves the company closer to this goal.

Security and Audit for SOC2

According to Subject, the Control Plane developer experience is easy to reason about and enables them to stay focused on the user experience of students and educators. This has also enabled new members of the team to begin contributing more quickly. Having a Global Virtual Cloud within Control Plane that is split into production and development environments with clear separation has increased developer efficiency.

Flexibility and Ease of Use for Growth

The Control Plane team has formed a great relationship with Subject’s engineering team and helped them institute security best practices for access control and data security, starting with Control Plane and extending outward to other aspects of Subject’s infrastructure. Subject’s Director of Engineering Nantana Minale has appreciated this holistic approach to problem solving along with Control Plane’s responsiveness to routine support issues.

A Productive Partnership

Subject is working to empower learners, educators, and school administrators through an education platform that unlocks opportunities. Control Plane enables Subject to deliver this platform reliably, securely, and flexibly, even as the company’s infrastructure needs grow and change.

Subject is an accredited learning platform that empowers school districts to deliver quality education to any learner – augmenting a district’s existing educators. The company is addressing a huge problem in the current education system, and one made even more pressing by the pandemiccplncolon how to deliver equal educational opportunities amid vast inequalities in socioeconomic status, district resources, and educator staffing.cplnbreakThe company delivers video-based courses through a frontend React portal for students and educators paired with an internal administration interface. Both frontends interact with backend services through a REST API.

Multicloud Availability

Datacenters.com is a technology marketplace and aggregator. They offer data center colocation, cloud, connectivity, hardware, software, and managed services from providers worldwide. Visitors can quickly search data center listings, compare provider offerings and purchase technology solutions.

Like many young companies, Datacenters.com started with Heroku for the first version of their application. Mike Price, Datacenters.com’s CTO, found that Heroku was expensive if provisioned adequately, but otherwise slow. Reluctantly, Price moved the application to AWS, which addressed the company’s cost concerns without addressing architecture. If something – a bug, a memory leak – caused their application to go down, it required a server restart before things were back up again.cplnbreakIn normal circumstances, this might not create too many issues, but Price wanted “normal” to account for the unexpected. He knew this would require going multi-region and perhaps multi-cloud.

Preparing for the Unexpected

Datacenters.com

Mike Price

Datacenters.com began using Control Plane after a long search for other solutions. Because Datacenters.com was originally architected as a monolith, it required collaboration between Price’s team and Control Plane support to plan how to containerize the application and deploy it to two regions of two different cloud providerscplncolon AWS and GCP. Right now, their database is hosted directly on AWS, but Price plans to move this to Control Plane in the future.cplnbreakSince switching to Control Plane, Price has been able to sleep a bit easier. If a replica – or even a region, or a whole cloud – goes down, his site is still up. Despite this Big-Tech-Grade resiliency, Price finds Control Plane to be relatively easy to use. It offers the streamlined developer experience they were looking for in Heroku without the constraints.

Resiliency of Multiple Clouds

Datacenters.com serves customers all over the world, but is currently focused on North America. In the future, Price sees the ability to quickly add regions to their infrastructure in Control Plane as a way to expand the business geographically.cplnbreakIt’s been eight years since the company’s inception and while Datacenters.com has gone through numerous iterations, it has remained monolithic in its application architecture. Price is considering the pros and cons of switching to a microservices architecture to gain greater separation of concerns, but knows it’s a big job. The transition to Control Plane gives Price greater flexibility to plan for this project while keeping the current site up and running.

Flexibility for Change

Datacenters.com gives customers greater transparency and options when shopping for colocation, bare metal and multi-cloud solutions. Control Plane enables Datacenters.com to offer resilient yet flexible service to their customers that doesn’t require sleepless nights.

Datacenters.com is a technology marketplace and aggregator. They offer data center colocation, cloud, connectivity, hardware, software, and managed services from providers worldwide. Visitors can quickly search data center listings, compare provider offerings and purchase technology solutions.cplnbreakThe company’s technology stack is built on Ruby on Rails with a React frontend.

Unfailing Multicloud Reliability

Acoer provides healthcare organizations rich, relevant, interoperable, out of the box RESTful APIs which serve as the internal gearing to build modern healthcare applications that are transparent and trustworthy. Jim Nasr, Acoer’s CEO, sees the company’s role similarly to that of the internal movement makers in the watch industry – offering unfailingly reliable internal mechanisms which companies can use as the building blocks for higher-level apps.

In one sense, customer requirements for Acoer’s APIs are simplecplncolon they must “just work” at all times. But the size and complexity of each client, along with geographic and regulatory nuances, often make delivering fault-tolerant solutions extraordinarily difficult. A customer may, for instance, require dedicated vs shared infrastructure and/or need multiple geographic regions on multiple clouds but stipulate the exclusion of certain geographies in order to meet regulatory requirements.cplnbreakNasr is no stranger to complex infrastructure, having previously built and maintained large-scale AWS and Azure environments in his former job as Chief Software Architect for the Centers for Disease Control. Under his leadership, Acoer built their initial infrastructure in AWS EKS but this required their best application engineers to spend time on DevOps.cplnbreakThis level of investment and resource allocation was necessary but sub-optimal. Nasr knew that every day his top developers spent elbow-deep in EKS administration meant a feature left unfinished.

cplnquoteIt Just Workscplnquote Requires a Lot of Work

Acoer

Jim Nasr

When Nasr found Control Plane in early 2021, he immediately saw how it could help Acoer take their infrastructure to the next level of resiliency while at the same time reducing the DevOps burden on their engineering team.cplnbreakAcoer products and services now run on Control Plane with the flexibility to create dedicated or shared environments that are running on the clouds and cloud regions required by each client.cplnbreakAs an example, Acoer's RightsHash service (a decentralized software engine to represent rights and protections) runs on Control Plane utilizing seven geographical regions spread across three different clouds. This distributed architecture ensures that the API is always available even if a region or an entire cloud goes down.cplnbreakOrdinarily, this type of multicloud architecture would be very complex and costly to build and maintain, but with Control Plane, Acoer has the flexibility to create and configure single-cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid infrastructure very simply and straightforwardly.cplnbreakSince Control Plane is built to enable multicloud deployments by default, Acoer is able to increase fault tolerance without increasing cloud spend or DevOps resources.

A Movement Maker for Infrastructure

Not only does Control Plane help to increase the resiliency of Acoer’s infrastructure, utilizing the Control Plane platform helps to increase fault tolerance across Acoer’s engineering team as well. Acoer’s engineers can deploy and manage workloads on Control Plane easily, eliminating the need for a specialized middleman who might or might not be available. Enabling Acoer’s engineers to operate independently speeds up the pace of innovation.

A Fault Tolerant Team

Acoer is enabling increased transparency and trustworthiness in the healthcare industry by acting as one of the industry’s “movement makers” - offering highly fault tolerant API-based gearing for higherlevel apps. In the same way Acoer’s customers trust them for always-on reliability, Acoer trusts Control Plane to provide multicloud infrastructure as a service – freeing them to focus on customer value.

Acoer provides healthcare organizations rich, relevant, interoperable, out of the box RESTful APIs which serve as the internal gearing to build modern healthcare applications that are transparent and trustworthy. Jim Nasr, Acoer’s CEO, sees the company’s role similarly to that of the internal movement makers in the watch industry – offering unfailingly reliable internal mechanisms which companies can use as the building blocks for higher-level apps.cplnbreakAcoer’s solutions address two huge problems in healthcarecplncoloncplnbreakFirst, the healthcare industry is notoriously opaque – sometimes by design – but Acoer provides solutions to visualize and analyze mountains of raw medical data, distilling clear insights from fuzzy, complex datasets.cplnbreakSecond, Acoer builds on the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger to establish computational trust for each level of transaction so that their customers can trust the data’s validity and authenticity.

Casai is a hospitality concept designed for today’s generation of technology nomads. Casai offers customers beautiful, curated apartments in Brazil and Mexico that merge the design and comforts of a boutique hotel with the technology of a San Francisco home and the local ambiance of a vacation rental.cplnbreakAbout 50% of Casai’s bookings come through their marketing website, which is built on Django with a React front end. The remaining 50% comes through third parties like Airbnb managed through a property management system (PMS) called Guesty.cplnbreakCasai acquired Loopkey – a physical access management platform – early in 2022 to enable Casai to improve and automate the process of giving and removing access to properties.

Casai’s marketing site is architected as a monolith and is hosted on AWS, but the engineering team develops new functionality as microservices with the intent of decomposing the monolith over time. Daniel Sandoval, Casai’s VP of Engineering, initially considered building and maintaining Kubernetes clusters in AWS EKS for deploying these new microservices.cplnbreak The real challenge, however, proved to be finding the talent necessary to manage Kubernetes once the cluster was up and running. Casai found it very difficult and expensive to recruit and retain DevOps talent. Candidates who had the qualifications they needed were in such high demand that they were a constant flight risk.cplnbreakGiven these headwinds, Sandoval was open to a tip from Casai’s previous CTO about a product called Control Plane that might alleviate the need for a full DevOps team

Finding the Right People - or Product

Casai

Daniel Sandoval

After an evaluation period, Casai began deploying new microservices – such as a messaging service for Casai’s guests – on Control Plane while continuing to host the monolith on AWS. This enables Casai to deploy new microservices much faster.cplnbreak Casai chose to run these microservices in the same AWS region as their monolith and uses Control Plane’s Universal Cloud Identity to connect to AWS RDS and SQS without having to embed credentials in each workload.cplnbreak Casai has also chosen to run test and dev environments in Control Plane because the platform enables them to scale these workloads to zero when not in use – thereby reducing cost without slowing down development.

Getting to Market Faster

One of Sandoval’s key challenges is how to optimize his own time while keeping his developers working productively. He doesn’t want to be constantly on call for DevOps support, forcing each developer to wait for his availability.cplnbreak Because Control Plane is far easier to learn and easier to use than EKS, Casai’s application engineers and data engineers can operate independently – supported not by a DevOps team but by a simpler development environment

Helping Developers Help Themselves

Loopkey – Casai's integrated technology for granting and revoking physical access to its properties – runs on a separate technology stack with a separate monolith hosted on AWS.cplnbreak Similarly, Casai deploys new microservices for Loopkey on Control Plane and (because the Loopkey monolith is better packaged) they may choose to move the Loopkey monolith to Control Plane at some point. The physical Loopkey locks are used in all of Casai’s properties in Brazil and they are integrating the Loopkey API with the existing locks for properties in Mexico.

A Separate Environment for Loopkey

Casai offers their customers curated, tech-forward accommodations with everything customers need already in place. Similarly, Control Plane offers Casai a curated development environment with key functionality built-in to help them bring concepts to market faster.

Flexibility and efficiency serving clients

IIInigence is a 40-person digital solutions agency building custom web and mobile applications spanning blockchain, gaming, and more. The firm works with dozens of clients across industries. Some of these clients specify their own cloud, but for most, IIInigence is responsible to requirements. cplnbreak IIInigence usually builds three environments for each project – one for development, one for testing, and one for production.

IIInigence began using Control Plane in 2021 and quickly found it to be the perfect solution to clients’ varied infrastructure requirements. Jude Lee, IIInigence’ CEO, believes that Control Plane enables the same level of configurability and flexibility as AWS or Azure but the simplicity of a platform like Heroku. cplnbreak Lee can create new Global Virtual Cloud (GVC) environments in seconds and assign each environment one or more regions on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Usually, IIInigence assigns one region each to the development and testing environments and two or more to production.

Looking for a Middle Ground

IIInigence

Jude Lee

Most of IIInigence’ clients are early stage, so no single environment is likely to consume huge amounts of compute resources. However, Lee found in many instances that merely having a server or a cluster up and running on AWS incurred substantial costs. With Control Plane, IIInigence compute costs scale precisely with the project’s requirements and since many services like NAT gateways, load balancers, DNS, and the like are included in Control Plane by default, adding environments has an incremental rather than an exponential effect on cost. cplnbreak Control Plane’s cost model is so efficient that Lee doesn’t even pass along the compute costs for very small projects. As compute costs grow, IIInigence can easily break out compute costs by GVC for billing purposes.

Economical at Any Scale

Lee has been impressed by the responsiveness and skill level of Control Plane’s support team. Each Control Plane customer gets a Discord channel, and Iiinigence routine support requests are addressed almost instantly. Not only that, but when IIInigence has suggested new functionality, Control Plane has brought the features to production very quickly.

Futuristic support

IIInigence is able to provide reliable yet flexible infrastructure for dozens of client projects cost-efficiently with Control Plane.

Achieving Faster Time-to-Market

Allio Finance LLC is a fintech company dedicated to providing a comprehensive micro-investment solution for customers navigating and trading in the stock market.

Allio

David Chen

Allio Finance faced a central challenge in optimizing both development and operational resources while striving to implement a serverless architecture for its Node.js apps. The intricacies of managing resources efficiently in a micro-investment setting, where agility and responsiveness are paramount, necessitated a solution that could simplify deployment processes, reduce manual intervention, and enhance overall operational efficiency.

The complexity of provisioning resources for Node.js apps in a serverless environment posed challenges related to resource coordination, access control, and security. Allio Finance aimed to address these challenges to ensure a smooth deployment process, minimize downtime, and create a foundation for rapid experimentation and migration within its existing AWS VPC resources.

In seeking a solution, the overarching goal was to find a comprehensive solution that not only addressed the immediate resource optimization challenges but also contributed to faster time-to-market and a streamlined operational workflow for their micro-investment solutions.

Streamlining Resource Efficiency for Micro-Investments

Control Plane's support for serverless containers, codified as Docker images, became a pivotal feature for Allio Finance. This allowed the company to efficiently deploy and manage its Node.js apps without the overhead of traditional server management, leading to enhanced resource utilization and a more agile infrastructure.

Serverless Containerization

Meeting industry standards such as SOC2 compliance was integral for Allio Finance. Control Plane's commitment to security, complete with tamper-proof audit trail and access controls, provided the necessary assurances for regulatory compliance. This ensures that micro-investment operations were conducted within a secure and auditable framework.

Compliance and Security Measures

The seamless integration with Terraform proved instrumental in Allio Finance's resource coordination and experimentation. The ability to work with existing AWS VPC resources, coupled with Terraform's infrastructure as code capabilities, empowered the company to easily adapt to evolving requirements and swiftly migrate applications.

Integration with Terraform

Control Plane's commitment to customer success was evident in the smooth implementation process facilitated by the platform's support teams. Extensive documentation, including example GitLab/GitHub CI repositories, provided Allio Finance with valuable resources for navigating and maximizing the platform's capabilities.

Technical Support and Documentation

Control Plane's solution ensured zero downtime during the deployment of test and production backend apps. This not only contributed to a seamless user experience but also enhanced the reliability of Allio Finance's micro-investment solutions.

Zero Downtime Deployment

Allio Finance experienced significant efficiency gains through the implementation and maintenance of serverless containers on Control Plane. The platform's role in achieving faster time-to-market, accelerating the company's marketing timeline by six months, demonstrated its tangible impact on operational timelines and business objectives.

Efficiency Gains and Time-to-Market

Control Plane's Solution: A Comprehensive Approach to Resource Efficiency

In essence, Control Plane's solution not only addressed the immediate challenges posed by resource optimization but also provided a foundation for ongoing operational efficiency, security, and adaptability in the dynamic landscape of micro-investments in the fintech sector. The platform's features, support, and future-oriented roadmap positioned it as a valuable asset for Allio Finance's continued success.

Scaling with 99.999% Availability

[DIV Brands](https://divbrands.io) is a direct-to-consumer brand holding company that launches and scales offers online through performance marketing, with in-house creative and tech teams. They operate remotely, with contributors from operating from 19 countries around the world. Their brands include [BÆRSkin](https://baerskintactical.com), one of the most sold hoodies in america and [Hyper Arch Motion](https://hyperarchmotion.com), an orthopaedic line of sneakers.

DIV Brands

Gus Fune

In the dynamic realm of e-commerce, DIV Brands encountered a series of challenges that prompted a strategic reassessment of their operational landscape. One of the primary hurdles they faced was the instability stemming from vendor relationships. Downtime issues and a lack of reliability from e-commerce providers led to significant revenue disruptions, forcing DIV Brands to reevaluate their technological infrastructure.

The e-commerce sector places a premium on high availability and reliability. For DIV Brands, the pivotal moment came when they decided to part ways with a vendor that failed to provide the stable foundation crucial for seamless online transactions. Recognizing the critical importance of a robust and scalable solution, they embarked on a journey to build an in-house infrastructure that could meet their specific needs. The imperative was not only to address existing challenges but also to proactively position themselves for future growth and global expansion.

Scalability and global accessibility became nonnegotiable criteria in their search for an ideal solution. Traditional e-commerce providers were falling short of meeting these requirements, leading DIV Brands to explore alternatives that could provide a more resilient foundation. The decision to delve into the capabilities of Control Plane was born out of the need for an virtual cloud platform that guaranteed reliability and scalability.

Rethinking Resilience in E-commerce

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) were a crucial KPI for DIV Brands. Control Plane positively impacted DIV Brands' daily operations by enabling them to host services in multiple regions with 99.999% availability and ultra-low latency - boosting their customer trust. The ability to operate on multiple clouds enhanced overall reliability, addressing the company's concerns about potential outages and disruptions.

Control Plane’s SLA of 99.999% High Availability

The journey with Control Plane was not just about technology; it was about partnership. DIV Brands commended Control Plane's support team for their responsiveness and unwavering assistance throughout the implementation process. The platform's user-friendly interface and straightforward implementation process ensured a seamless transition, minimizing disruptions to daily operations.

Responsive Support and Implementation Ease

Security is paramount in e-commerce, especially when dealing with luxury and lifestyle products. Control Plane's PCI compliance out of the box provided DIV Brands with a robust security framework, streamlining their adherence to industry standards. This not only fortified their defenses against potential threats but also eliminated the need for cumbersome compliance procedures.

PCI Compliance and Security Assurance

One of Control Plane's standout features was its support for multi-cloud deployment. DIV Brands harnessed this capability to diversify their cloud strategy, ensuring resilience and mitigating risks associated with relying on a single cloud provider. The multi-cloud flexibility empowered DIV Brands with a strategic advantage in managing their digital infrastructure.

Multi-Cloud Flexibility

Control Plane's holistic approach to infrastructure management stood out as a differentiator. By providing an virtual cloud platform, Control Plane empowered DIV Brands with cloud-native maturity without the exhaustive investments typically associated with achieving such a status. The platform streamlined complex processes, offering a single pane of glass for managing multiple environments and enhancing overall observability and security.

Holistic Infrastructure Management

Secure Scalability & Reliability

The partnership's success lay in the precise alignment of Control Plane's capabilities with DIV Brands' aspirations. The platform's high availability, as evidenced by a remarkable SLA of 99.999%, addressed one of DIV Brands' pivotal concerns - ensuring uninterrupted service to their global customer base. This achievement not only met industry standards but exceeded them, reinforcing DIV Brands' commitment to reliability and customer trust.

Unleashing Scalability and Reliability

[Fastback](https://www.fastbackrefunds.com/) is a tech-driven company focused on revolutionizing the retail industry. Specializing in offering instant refunds on returned merchandise, Fastback streamlines the customer experience and enhances brand loyalty in a competitive market.

Fastback

Yitz Dancziger

In the recent past, Fastback encountered several challenges while navigating the complexities of managing resources across multiple cloud platforms. These challenges posed significant hurdles for the company, particularly as it strived to maintain its commitment to providing instant refunds and ensuring seamless service delivery. The potential consequences of these challenges were tangible, including decreased customer satisfaction, increased operational costs, and a risk to its competitive edge.

Fastback's ability to deliver instant refunds depended heavily on maintaining uninterrupted service availability. Any disruptions could lead to dissatisfaction among customers and damage to the company's reputation.

High Availability Demands

Operating in a dynamic environment, Fastback faced rapid fluctuations in demand. Meeting these changing needs required a flexible and scalable infrastructure, which traditional solutions struggled to provide effectively.

Scalability Requirements

Managing resources across various cloud platforms introduced numerous operational complexities for Fastback. From coordinating deployments to ensuring robust security measures, the company grappled with the intricacies of maintaining operational efficiency.

Operational Complexity

Striking the right balance between performance and cost efficiency remained an ongoing challenge. Without effective resource management strategies, Fastback risked overspending on cloud resources or compromising service quality to cut costs.

Cost Optimization

In summary, Fastback had to confront these inherent challenges of multi-cloud management to safeguard its reputation, control costs, and maintain its competitive position. Addressing these issues directly was crucial for the company's continued success in the market.

Struggle to Ensure Instant Refunds

Fastback's engineering team sought to overcome the challenges of managing resources across multiple cloud environments while ensuring optimal performance and costefficiency. Control Plane emerged as a solution, offering a comprehensive set of tools and features designed to streamline operations and enhance scalability.

Control Plane provided Fastback with a single-pane-of-glass solution to manage and optimize resources across multiple cloud environments. As an internal developer platform offering instant cloud-native maturity, Control Plane helped Fastback simplify resource provisioning across AWS and GCP. Additionally, Control Plane streamlined monitoring processes by centralizing logging, metrics, and tracing capabilities, providing Fastback's engineering team with comprehensive insights into system performance and health. This holistic approach allowed Fastback to efficiently oversee the entire infrastructure, identify and resolve issues proactively, and ensure optimal resource utilization across their multi-cloud environment.

Unified Cloud Management and Optimization

By leveraging Control Plane’s Capacity AI™, Fastback was able to achieve automatic adjustment of resources in response to real-time demand. This capability allowed Fastback to dynamically scale resources up or down as needed, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency without requiring manual intervention. As a result, Fastback could respond swiftly to fluctuations in workload demands, allocating resources efficiently to maintain service levels while minimizing unnecessary expenditure. This proactive approach to resource management not only enhanced the reliability and scalability of Fastback's infrastructure but also contributed to significant cost savings over time.

Dynamic Scaling for Performance and Cost-Efficiency

Control Plane offered Fastback 24/7 support availability, ensuring prompt assistance and resolution of any issues. Dedicated support channels staffed by knowledgeable experts contributed to a smooth implementation process and ongoing operational excellence.

24/7 Technical Support

Control Plane revolutionized Fastback's cloud management strategy, offering a seamless, unified platform to optimize resources across multiple environments. With Capacity AI™ auto-scaling, Fastback could dynamically adjust resources in real-time, ensuring peak performance and costefficiency without manual intervention. This streamlined approach to resource provisioning and centralized monitoring provided Fastback with actionable insights to optimize spending and enhance operational efficiency. By leveraging Control Plane, Fastback achieved unprecedented scalability, reliability, and cost savings, cementing its position as a leader in the digital landscape.

Maximizing ROI: Multi-Cloud and K8s Optimization

[Outrider](https://www.outrider.ai), the pioneer in autonomous yard operations for logistics hubs, helps large enterprises improve safety and increase efficiency. The only company exclusively focused on automating all aspects of yard operations, Outrider eliminates manual tasks that are hazardous and repetitive. Outrider’s mission is to drive the rapid adoption of sustainable freight transportation by deploying zero-emission systems. Outrider is a private company backed by NEA, 8VC, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and other top-tier investors.

Outrider

Jay Eberhard

One of Outrider’s primary hurdles was the need to operate across multiple cloud providers seamlessly. As a startup, Outrider sought flexibility in choosing cloud environments but struggled with the complexity and lack of interoperability among different platforms. This challenge hindered their ability to adapt quickly to changing business requirements and constrained their innovation potential.

Moreover, managing Kubernetes infrastructure posed a considerable obstacle for Outrider, especially with a small team. The intricacies of Kubernetes management required significant time and resources, diverting attention away from core development tasks. Outrider recognized the urgent need for a solution that could streamline their Kubernetes operations, reduce complexity, and enable their team to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.

In addition to multi-cloud and Kubernetes challenges, Outrider faced issues with excessive cloud spending. With limited visibility and control over resource usage, they struggled to optimize costs effectively while maintaining performance and scalability. The lack of cost optimization tools and strategies further exacerbated their financial challenges, inhibiting their ability to allocate resources efficiently and invest in growth initiatives.

Furthermore, Outrider's small team lacked the resources to address implementation challenges and ongoing support needs adequately. They needed a solution provider that could offer comprehensive support and guidance throughout the integration process and beyond. Without dedicated assistance, Outrider risked encountering roadblocks that could delay their time-tomarket and hinder their competitive edge in the fastpaced autonomous vehicle industry.

A Need for Multi-Cloud and K8s Management

Control Plane provided Outrider with the capability to seamlessly manage operations across multiple cloud providers, addressing the need for flexibility without vendor lock-in. This feature allowed Outrider to deploy and scale their autonomous vehicle infrastructure across various cloud environments, ensuring adaptability and resilience.

Unified Multi-Cloud Management

With a small team and limited resources, Outrider faced challenges in efficiently managing Kubernetes infrastructure. Control Plane offered a solution that simplified Kubernetes management, enabling Outrider to focus on core development tasks rather than infrastructure overhead. This streamlined approach enhanced productivity and accelerated time-tomarket for Outrider's innovative solutions.

Streamlined Kubernetes Operations

Excessive cloud spending was a significant concern for Outrider, impacting their financial sustainability and resource allocation. Control Plane provided comprehensive visibility and control over cloud spending, allowing Outrider to optimize costs effectively while maintaining performance and scalability. This cost optimization feature enabled Outrider to allocate resources efficiently and invest in growth initiatives.

Outrider's small team lacked the resources to address implementation challenges and ongoing support needs adequately. Control Plane offered dedicated support throughout the integration process and beyond, ensuring a smooth rollout and ongoing guidance. This level of support empowered Outrider to navigate operational challenges with confidence and efficiency, enhancing their competitive edge in the autonomous vehicle industry.

Dedicated Support

Cost-Effective Multi-Cloud Mastery

By leveraging Control Plane's tailored solutions, Outrider was able to overcome operational hurdles, achieve efficiency gains, and drive growth in the competitive autonomous vehicle industry. With unified multi-cloud management, streamlined Kubernetes operations, cost optimization, and dedicated support, Control Plane provided Outrider with the tools and support needed to succeed in their journey toward innovation and scalability.

Customer Success Stories