This week, François-Guillaume, architect & lead dev @ iAdvize, tells us his journey using Clever Cloud across three startups he has been involved in.
Can you introduce the projects you host on Clever Cloud?
Of course. We started our professional relationship with Clever Cloud when we looked at PaaS host offering for Bringr. Bringr was a startup I co-founded in 2010 that allowed brands to watch, understand and communicate on social media. Our clients (Lagardère, Eram, Carambar, BNP Paribas…) used Bringr to set up real-time dashboards and were able to create their social media strategy and measure their publications’ impact.
Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges? Can you share some metrics with us to give us an idea?
Time-to-market is key. Being able to develop locally a app and deploy it through git push and then delegate the deployment, monitoring and scaling is a real competitive advantage Clever Cloud offers. When we launched Bringr, I was managing 7 servers in a private network at Online. System administration and monitoring had a massive time impact on day-to-day work as a CTO. After two years and enough cash flow, we migrated to Clever Cloud and were able to focus even more on our product.
How did you discover Clever Cloud?
Every member of Clever Cloud team is very active in the Nantes tech ecosystem, I met Quentin and Clément at several occasions before even thinking about switching to Clever-Cloud.
When did you start using it and what and what are your thoughts?
We have been using Clever Cloud for more than two years. 99% of Bringr micro-services infrastructure is on Clever Cloud. Same for Redsmin. After Bringr was bought by iAdvize, we wanted to keep our competitive advantage, that’s why part of iAdvize services are hosted on Clever Cloud.
Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous hosting provider?
Yes. Both.
Was it simple to switch hosting provider?
Most of Bringr and Redsmin applications are written in Node.js and Scala and require MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB. The migration was easy thanks to Clever Cloud DBaaS offering. Concerning our specific needs (for example we have a highly available RabbitMQ cluster), the Clever Cloud support team was always there to answer quickly and set up what we needed.
What do you most like on Clever Cloud?
Unequalled economical time-to-market.
What features are you expecting the most?
A complete access to instances and apps monitoring, Docker builds cache, private Docker registry and RabbitMQ plug’n’play add-on. Yes, I know, long list.
How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn’t use it yet?
It’s like AWS Beanstalk or Heroku but French, more secure and flexible with a brilliant and very reactive support.