SMSO Case Study

Challenge

Back in 2020, as their product was gaining traction, the biggest problem the SMSO founding team was facing was lack of control and predictability over their software development and release for their platform. The founding team had  significant experience and expertise in the telecommunication industry, but limited experience in building and shipping software. Without a dedicated ops team, the founders were over-relying on a small software development team to both build and deploy the software, but also to manage the infrastructure and production environments.

This was causing lots of friction as software developers were reluctant to take ownership of production environments, releases were happening ad-hoc (business owners had at times no choice but to wait for the dev team to do deployments to production).

Furthermore, scaling the infrastructure to meet peeks in demand was not possible and reliability was less than desired.

Lack of structured process and clear responsibilities was causing technical problems for the platform on the technical side, but also much stress and frustration on the business side.

Solution

BlackFriday 2020 made it clear to Catalin (one of the founders of SMSO) that the team needed help with releasing to and managing production environments. He reached out to the Bunnyshell team for urgent audit and fixes, and this turned into a long term collaboration.

The audit identified several factors affecting the performance, reliability and scalability of the SMSO platform and also recommended specific architecture improvements. Over the coming weeks Bunnyshell engineers helped SMSO recreate their infrastructure in AWS using the Bunnyshell CloudManager platform.

Results

Managing infrastructure and environments with Bunnyshell CloudManager brought the expected benefits but also extra ones.

As expected of a communications platform, service uptime has been in the 99.999% range since the migration

A software development process is now in place, with dev, staging and production environments, reliable deployment pipelines give the confidence to release new software any time needed.

As an added benefit, the SMSO team now has a centralized view of their software infrastructure, with integrated monitoring and logging, allowing proactive actions and easy troubleshooting.

The infrastructure is now able to (auto)scale to meet peaks in traffic and BlackFriday campaigns are not problematic anymore.

Also, Bunnyshell engineers provide 24/7 support, premium support over dedicated Slack channels and act as trusted advisors when called upon.

But, as Catalin puts it, the highest order benefit for him and the founding team is the peace of mind that comes with knowing the technical aspects of their business are well under control and that they can focus their efforts and attention on growing the company.