Before CloudBolt, the enterprise relied on a complicated integration of vCloud Orchestrator, Chef, and a ticketing system to run their server provisioning processes. They struggled with slow turnaround time, a lack of governance, and difficulty understanding their costs. The time required to provision a single VM was reduced from one business day to just 15 minutes. The time to onboard new hosted clients was reduced from seven days to under 30 minutes.

Neustar relied on an internally developed provisioning platform to build resources in a new state of the art data center. However, due to other critical priorities, Neustar administrators were unable to allocate the time needed to extend and maintain the system. As a result, IT began to rely on AWS more and more to meet the service delivery demands of their customers. This resulted in a hefty AWS bill and an expensive datacenter being underutilized. Neustar needed a solution that would better leverage the existing capital investment and deliver services to their customers in a timely and simple manner. Specifically, an “AWSlike” experience combined with the necessary visibility and control of costs and assets.

Before CloudBolt, Blackboard relied on a complicated integration of vCloud Orchestrator, Chef, and a ticketing system to run their server provisioning processes. They struggled with slow turn-around time, a lack of governance, and difficulty understanding their costs. The time required to provision a single VM was reduced from 1 business day to just 15 minutes. The time to onboard new hosted clients was reduced from 7 days to under 30 minutes.

In 2014, Home Depot's IT team realized that they were spending an average of 1-2 weeks to provision VMs for their end users and had a growing shadow IT problem. They decided to evaluate cloud management platforms (including CloudBolt, VMWare’s vRA, Cliqr, CSC Matrix, and a couple of others) to see if one of these CMPs could help them address their challenges. After an exhaustive evaluation, they chose CloudBolt and told us that they were impressed by its simplicity, extensibility, elegance, and its low overhead to install, upgrade, and maintain.

The university’s Office of Information Technology cloud team was tasked with implementing various cloud-based services and exposing them to students and staff in a controlled and reliable manner. They needed a unified interface that would allow end users to easily find and request services. They wanted to enable the use of both public cloud providers and existing university assets while tracking and reporting resource usage to better understand and manage respective costs and capabilities. The team was also faced with the challenge of reducing VM sprawl through active system lifecycle management and repurposing IT resources to advance the university’s educational mission.

The IT group at the Fortune 500 US-based retailer primarily services the e-commerce group, which is responsible for the web storefronts of all the corporate brands, and for a significant portion of the company’s revenue. To speed delivery of new and innovative capabilities, the e-commerce team needed a platform that would allow on-demand access to production and development/test resources, with high compliance to PCI and other standards. Initially, they experimented with a homegrown solution based on OpenStack, but this was rejected by the CIO because it failed to effectively take into account the needs of other lines of business. The potential for infrastructure fragmentation, extra costs, and large amounts of duplicated work caused this company to search for a better solution.

NBCUniversal (NBCU) is an international film and TV studio and distributor. To support the growing consumer shift to digital and mobile consumption of media and entertainment, NBCUniversal knew they needed to have better insight into their software development process and bring developers and operators closer together. They leveraged Splunk to deliver better insights on their internal processes, but soon ran into limitations on their architecture. NBCU’s Splunk application was a critical tool for their DevOps efforts, but their existing environment was underperforming – it was limited in its architecture to ingest 1 TB per day. Like many organizations, their data sets were constantly growing. 1 TB/day wasn’t enough — they wrestled with a huge backlog of unprocessed data and had lost the ability to drive actions in real time. The limits of their physical infrastructure and deployment methods were limiting scale.

As New Relic anticipated their future growth, they saw it as an opportunity to rethink their own application architecture. This led New Relic to morph their existing monolithic application components into a service-oriented architecture with a goal of increasing their number of software deployments each day. At the same time, they were planning to greatly increase their infrastructure and launch new products and features into the marketplace. As a SaaS company, these transitions were not taken lightly, as any changes to the existing infrastructure and services instantly touches their customers. To aid in this transition, the Site Engineering group, including – Sean Kane Lead Site Reliability Engineer Karl Matthias and Sean Kane, along with several product teams, started to investigate Docker, the open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications.

Sleepy Giant, an independent online game company, was in need of a public cloud solution that could provide flexibility in scaling infrastructure up or down at a moment's notice. The gaming industry is characterized by unpredictable usage spikes due to organic, viral uptake and paid promotions. When these spikes occur, it is crucial that infrastructure be quickly scaled up. If increased usage is not met with adequate infrastructure, then players suffer from decreased response times, the game experience deteriorates and opportunities are missed. Sleepy Giant also required a support team with broad knowledge and competence to help build the right infrastructure for its partners. They were seeking a team that could provide customized solutions and recommend proven options to meet the continuously expanding needs of its diverse projects. Lastly, Sleepy Giant wanted to reduce infrastructure costs while continuing to deliver improvements in performance to customers. This meant considerations of alternatives to ownership and management of physical hardware.

Wanelo, a community for all of the world’s shopping, was experiencing a surge in popularity and traffic to its website and mobile apps. The company wanted a cloud environment that was designed for performance and could cost-effectively handle traffic surges. The company's growth, expressed in terms of requests per minute (RPMs), took off in a period of approximately four months following a major site rewrite. Wanelo wanted a cloud environment that could handle the evening surges without a cost penalty or needing to overprovision the system to accommodate those times of peak traffic. They also wanted more OS functionality than Linux.

Digital Chocolate, a leading provider of social games, was facing a challenge with its growing daily active users (DAUs) base. As the DAU base grew, so did the company's infrastructure costs. Initially, supporting the explosive DAU growth was the company's primary focus. However, as the business evolved and the complexity of supporting games increased, it became clear that Digital Chocolate required a more flexible solution to accommodate its needs. The company needed to ensure that its costs per DAU didn't exceed its revenue per DAU. With Digital Chocolate's incumbent cloud infrastructure provider, sudden bursts of bandwidth usage often drove up costs, jeopardizing the profitability of some games. The company also needed to ensure maximum performance and adaptability to its needs.

Nerve.com, an online dating and content site, wanted to build a new type of dating app that used social content and conversations to mimic dating interactions in the physical world. They planned to use the latest web app technologies, using a Nodestack deployment of Node.js application servers and MongoDB databases. However, they wanted to remain focused on building apps and not waste time maintaining and administering databases, application servers and hardware. They didn't have any dedicated systems administration specialists nor did they want any. Data reliability and security were paramount for the site. The real-time nature of interactions on social.nerve.com required instantaneous response times from both the database and the application server to keep users happy. To maintain both performance and reliability would require excellent support and uptime.

Message Bus, a cloud-native application company, was seeking to provide a service that could eliminate the challenges around building email or mobile messaging capabilities into any software or web application. They wanted to offer a viable alternative to using out-of-the-box enterprise messaging software. However, to continue telling a compelling cloud story in the marketplace, they needed to work with a cloud infrastructure provider that could truly deliver all the advantages of the cloud. They needed scalability, consistent performance measurement across their network, CPUs, and disks, support for new standards and technologies, and a true business partner.

Reebonz, an exclusive online shopping destination, was facing repeated problems when the response to popular sales crashed their Web infrastructure. The company releases deals at noon Singapore time, which resulted in a tidal wave of pageview requests in a very concentrated time. This led to many outages and loss of revenues during the peak hour. The company needed a solution that could respond to demand spikes by scaling quickly and massively. They also wanted a cost-effective cloud computing solution and strong migration support for moving their significant infrastructure.

ModCloth, an online retailer specializing in vintage-inspired women’s fashion and decor, was experiencing rapid growth and needed a highly scalable, agile, and consistent cloud infrastructure to support its ecommerce website. The company's site experience is built around a quick and agile inventory strategy that involves launching 25 to 50 items every day, resulting in 30% of customers visiting more than once per day. Therefore, the performance of the website was a business imperative. ModCloth needed visibility into its infrastructure to solve performance issues and ensure the applications were built correctly for future performance on the platform. The company also needed to deliver a consistently great experience to customers, regardless of how busy the site was or how congested the network might become. Furthermore, ModCloth needed the ability to make changes quickly to take advantage of new opportunities and respond to customers’ changing behaviors.

Quizlet, a rapidly growing online study platform, was seeking a cloud platform to build its business on. The company required a solution that offered data reliability and 100% uptime, superior analytics tools for faster page loads, premium hardware in the data center, and responsive support. The company's users would be accessing the site from various devices and locations, exposing them to a diverse set of data delivery and network conditions. Therefore, Quizlet needed to quickly analyze and troubleshoot any application latencies to tune apps for high-speed page delivery. The company also wanted to ensure proactive fixes for any problem to prevent cascading failures that affect end users.

Moonshadow Mobile needed an infrastructure that could allow it to deliver highly detailed geospatial data in online mapping applications in near real time for a highly demanding customer base paying big bucks for unique applications. The company offers over 200 real-time web and mobile applications for customers and delivers population data in numerous ways and forms. The challenge is that usage is variable. So if you don’t have to over-provision servers for massive spikes in usage but still maintain performance, you will save a lot of money. Moonshadow also wanted high-speed internal networks to push huge volumes of data between the database and the application networks as well as a way to easily distribute its workloads across multiple application servers to ensure customers always got fast response times via the Internet.

Nodejitsu, a premier Node.js platform as a service provider, was looking for a cloud infrastructure provider that could offer deep knowledge of Node.js, easy account management, better performance, and high reliability. They wanted to offer the highest levels of performance to its clients and needed a cloud provider that could support their infrastructure-agnostic service that automatically scales to support the needs of applications. They also wanted to avoid the hassle of managing multiple hosting accounts once they exceed a certain number of servers.

Voxer, a social networking application that turns your phone into a walkie-talkie and an all-in-one messenger, faced a challenge when its user base grew 10X over the course of a month. Their Linux-based storage system could not handle the load, leading to peak times where users had to wait for their messages to be downloaded, instead of always streaming them live. Voxer's back-end software is written entirely in Node.js, which can be challenging to understand and operate in production and at scale. The company needed to improve performance and gain complete transparency into all critical processes in the Voxer architecture and application stack, from low-level CPU and disk processes to database queries to web application servers and HTTP operations.

Cargill, a global leader in the food, agriculture, financial and industrial sectors, was facing challenges in creating new digital products and services due to its legacy IT systems. The company's existing systems were slowing down its ability to innovate and meet the evolving needs of its customers and partners. Cargill recognized the need for a more dynamic and accessible internal suite of APIs to enable consumption across the entire company. The company wanted to transition from siloed legacy IT architecture to a modern, microservices architecture. However, the legacy API management vendors they considered were not aligned with their vision for decentralization.

Digicel, a telecommunications and home entertainment provider, embarked on an effort to launch a fully digital mobile network for its French West Indies region. The company's existing technology stack relied on a VPN network and ESB to expose services and faced issues with connectivity and functionality in microservices use cases. The company needed to adopt a microservices architecture to support this transformation and remain competitive. They were looking for an API gateway that would support their domain-driven design approach and work well with their architecture.

SoulCycle, a leading fitness market leader with more than 50,000 riders a week attending classes, was facing challenges due to its monolithic architecture which was a critical bottleneck to service development and scalability. With aggressive growth targets, SoulCycle needed to leverage technology to better integrate with partners and enable expansion into new business models. To address these challenges, Jason Rodriguez, VP of Engineering, and his team created the SoulCycle Podium Platform to support agile development for all internal and externally-facing applications. As part of this transition, Rodriguez and his team quickly realized the need for an API platform that could efficiently support SoulCycle’s more than 30 services, utilities, and monoliths across multiple clouds at scale.

Yahoo! Japan Corporation offers more than 100 services, including search engine, auction, news, weather, sport, email and shopping. Yahoo! Japan is the undisputed market leader in terms of page views with more than 70 billion each month. To maintain market leadership, Yahoo! Japan began transitioning towards microservices to accelerate service development and deployment. Consequently, Yahoo! Japan needed a new API platform to centralize its portfolio of APIs and to improve the security, availability and performance of its services. “We moved rapidly towards microservices over the past few years, and we needed to centralize our APIs,” said Kanaderu Fukuda, senior manager of the Computing Platform Department at Yahoo! Japan. “We began looking into API gateway products, and after comparing several products, decided to use Kong.”

Cort, a global leader in furniture rental and related services, standardized on the use of Kubernetes for important workloads such as Magento for e-commerce and BitBucket for their code repositories as well as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and other databases. They wanted to fully leverage and preserve benefits such as separation of concerns between applications and infrastructure, quick and consistent instantiation of environments, and enhanced operational efficiency benefits typically gained from using Kubernetes for compute. However, they found that despite extremely vocal support of ‘Cloud Native’ and Kubernetes, e.g., Container Storage Interface (CSI) adoption, all considered vendors were actually not Kubernetes native. They operated and behaved entirely differently than Kubernetes itself, increasing the complexity of the environment while creating a shared dependency for all stateful workloads. Additionally, to simplify operations and improve the resilience of their environments, including backing up and enabling disaster recovery across two domestic data centers, Cort wanted to have an easy to use application to centralize their management of Kubernetes as a data infrastructure management layer.

The insurance company was looking to improve their development agility by accelerating their adoption of containers as a service for their internal teams. They had been using Docker Swarm for stateless workloads, but with the emergence of Kubernetes and Kubernetes services such as Azure Kubernetes Services, they felt it was appropriate to begin to run stateful workloads on containers. However, they faced limitations in the performance and flexibility of underlying Azure storage, and Azure managed disks. They also encountered technical and performance limitations of Azure file, which is limited with SMB protocol only and can be tricky to manage.

Skullcandy, a leading audio brand, launched its eCommerce site in 2008. The site was built on the Magento eCommerce platform with PHP and Linux. The rapid growth of online sales put pressure on the interactive team to keep up with the increasing demands. The team's goal was to ensure that their online customers have a quick and easy purchase transaction every time they visit the site. However, the site was experiencing growing pains with a number of performance issues. Unplanned outages were on the rise, usually occurring more than once a week and often for significant duration. These outages equated to lost revenue, and potentially, even to lost customers. The team was still learning about performance issues and problems from their customers. Without any proactive real-time performance monitoring and management tools, they simply were not able to see what was going on in real time.

BlackLine Systems, a provider of enterprise-class software used to automate and control the financial close process, was facing challenges with its growing business and expanding global customer base. The company needed reliable high-speed performance to ensure delivery of its SaaS-based month-end close and reconciliation application to clients. Serving companies of all sizes that must adhere to compliance-related financial deadlines, BlackLine Systems had self-imposed performance and uptime requirements designed to meet customers’ varying needs. However, ensuring superior performance became more challenging as BlackLine’s customer base continued to grow rapidly. For the BlackLine app team, understanding application performance and having the ability to quickly find and diagnose performance issues before they affect customers became increasingly important.

Zumba Fitness, a global lifestyle brand that fuses fitness, entertainment, and culture into an exhilarating dance-party workout, has been experiencing rapid global growth with more than 50% of its 2011 growth coming from outside the United States. Zumba’s online stores are available on every continent and in more than 80 countries around the globe. With self-imposed performance objectives, the Zumba team is keenly aware that superior performance is essential for ensuring exceptional online service for both its B2C and B2B customers. Rapid growth has presented app performance challenges to the Zumba team, particularly in getting a clear picture of end user performance in various locations around the globe. The team had been using a combination of homegrown and open source tools, which required working across multiple environments – a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Additionally, mobile access created its own performance challenges. Zumba was finding it increasingly difficult to stay ahead of performance issues, let alone preventing them.

Uken, a cross-platform game developer, has eight games in production that have been downloaded more than 20 million times. The games are browser-based applications that push the limits of browser capabilities. The company processes about 800 Million requests each month. All common processes needed to run its games and business, such as user authentication, notifications, payments, analytics, and an ad platform, are pulled out and made into one of the twelve internally shared services. With self-imposed performance goals, Uken used basic tools and a few small Rails plugins to monitor and manage performance before they installed New Relic. This approach meant the team was spending valuable time performing manual work to determine what was going on and why some users were experiencing slow response times. The company quickly recognized that it needed some additional help.

Paper Culture, an eco-friendly stationery company, was facing challenges in maintaining 100% uptime and fast performance for its customers and search engines. The company often experienced seasonal spikes in traffic due to promotional email blasts, which could go viral and create a lot of additional traffic. This, coupled with customers uploading a wide range of complex image files, resulted in peak processing loads. As their business grew, Paper Culture was motivated to continually improve performance. The team had adopted an agile development strategy, often deploying daily enhancements, frequently on demand. It was critical for the technical team to understand the impact of every change on site performance. In the past, Paper Culture often learned about slow performance or other issues from their customers. When Paper Culture received one of these reports, they had to dive into logs for hours, going through thousands of lines of code and piecing a chain of events together to understand and resolve the issue. The technical team knew they needed better insight and control over the development and deployment environments if they wanted to achieve their goal of 100% customer satisfaction.