Customer Spotlight: Datacenters.com
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.
The company’s technology stack is built on Ruby on Rails with a React frontend.
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.
In 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.
“I’d find out the next morning that the server had been down – and our site with it. I knew we had to eliminate single points of failure.”
As DataCenters.com expanded its offerings and audience, the engineering team needed to ensure its infrastructure could keep up with the growing complexity and demand. The company faced challenges scaling its infrastructure to support a seamless user experience. Rapid development cycles, frequent feature updates, and the need for robust testing workflows made it critical to establish a streamlined and reliable development process.
In 2024, DataCenters.com made a significant upgrade to its development processes by adopting the shakacode/control-plane-flow open-source tool and cpflow CLI. This decision allowed the engineering team to implement features that ensured reliability and efficiency in their CI/CD workflows.
One of the standout features introduced was review apps, enabling the team to test pull requests (PRs) on live infrastructure before merging into staging. This approach provided a live environment for evaluating changes in real-world conditions, minimizing the risk of errors when promoting code to production.
By integrating the cpflow CLI into their CI/CD pipeline, the team benefited from simplified deployment workflows and a clear path from staging to production. This adoption supported the company’s commitment to delivering new features with confidence while maintaining high reliability for end-users.
Adopting cpflow enhanced the efficiency of the development process, resulting in faster feature releases and fewer errors in production. Engineers noted improved collaboration and reduced time spent debugging issues related to deployment mismatches.
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 providers: AWS and GCP. Right now, their database is hosted directly on AWS, but Price plans to move this to Control Plane in the future.
Since 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.
“We saw a lot of products claiming to be ‘multi-cloud’ but when you got past the fine print, none of them enabled you to deploy to multiple clouds out of the box the way Control Plane does. Most of them required some sort of laborious up-front setup or expensive consulting contracts.”
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.
It’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.
“Your business is going to change. That’s the only constant. Your infrastructure has to adapt to new requirements in order to grow. The flexibility we get with Control Plane helps us stay agile and ready for changing requirements.”
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.