Yash Kumar for StackExpress Testimonial

Speaker: Yash Kumar, Founder & CEO, Runnable Inc.

Yash Kumar: Yeah. So one of the things that we use stack Express for is 24x7 incident response on our AWS production environment. So if there is an incident or there's an outage, the stack Express team gets paged first, they investigate the issue and if they can't resolve it then they page one of our engineers. So our product was actually covered by Techcrunch and we saw a wave of sign ups into the product and as a result we were seeing a lot of outages because there was a bottleneck somewhere in our application, especially when it was talking to some of the backend services and the StackExpress team proactively engaged with those alerts. So they were paged first, they troubleshooted it, they restarted containers for us. They added additional virtual machines to handle the load, they updated our load balancers And they proactively handled sort of the surge in traffic and really shielded our engineering team from handling most of those alerts. I'd say about 90%, of those alerts were proactively handled by the StackExpress team and that was a huge benefit to us and something that we are grateful for that they were able to handle very effectively

Yash Kumar: Yeah, so one of the benefits we got from StackExpress is, they really reduced our aws bill. So we were spending almost $1 million dollars a year on AWS between our development, staging and production environments. So StackExpress came in, they understood our environment usage and then they automated the creation of our environments using terraform. So we had a lot of development environments that were sitting around and they were idling with no usage. We were able to tear down those environments and provision them on demand and tear them back down, really reducing the number of virtual machines that were provisioned. They also looked at our production environment and implemented Auto Scaling Groups on AWS, which really reduced I think by a factor of almost 90% the number of virtual machines that were provisioned because we were provisioning for peak capacity at all times. So we were able to reduce that and only scale up when we really had demand. So overall, we saw a massive reduction in our AWS bill and a hugely positive return on investment from using StackExpress

Yash Kumar: Yeah, so communicating with the DevOps team at StackExpress was very simple. So they basically assigned us a architect that worked very closely with our engineering teams to understand our environment and he would be responsible for documentation and knowledge capture and knowledge sharing back with the DevOps team at StackExpress. And then once we had fully onboarded the StackExpress team, we simply added them to our slack account and they just became a natural extension of our our development and operations team. So we would ping them on slack, they would respond to issues, they would reach out to us. If there was an incident where they needed help, we could assign them Jira tickets. So communication was very simple and easy and we were able to essentially integrate them into our workflow and how we did business. so that was really effective and it made the overall process very, very simple.