We went to meet Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com, to talk about the strategic and technical challenges of his solution. Our approach is to better understand the specificities of our clients' businesses and how our solutions fit into their activities.

A growing solution for devs

Developers and recruiters who use WeLoveDevs.com appreciate above all being in the best conditions to meet. Each party feels valued, listened to and considered. And this leads to a number of specific features in the software product. For example, the solution is deployed several times a day, so that it can evolve with the use of the developers.

Today, WeLoveDevs is a recognised media and job site, visited by more than 90K techs who think about their careers every month. Their main challenge today is to offer them even more job offers by meeting and registering new companies one by one.

Data hosting in France and performance

To meet the needs of their clients, WeLoveDevs needs to have servers in France, and good performance, and they were not satisfied with the containerized PaaS offers, proposed by Heroku for example.

Being in France is crucial because we keep the personal data of many developers who are very demanding and they deserve it. And for performance, it's also important for SEO.

Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

0% admin sys, 100% agility

Not wanting to be burdened with system administration, Damien has always used PaaS services. In the same logic, WeLoveDevs has therefore mainly adopted SaaS or serverless tools.

"We don't want to get up at night to do SSH and connect to a machine.
If it works on your machine, it works a few minutes later on the PaaS."

Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

His challenge is to keep a small tech team, as agile as possible. The objective: to be able to put a feature into production within a day, after talking to a client, and therefore to keep this proximity with their clients. As a result, a solution that allows them to do without backend devs or ops suits them very well.

Why did you choose Clever Cloud?

Damien: "CleverCloud is the only player that meets our performance requirements and allows us to deploy continuously via Git. Also we didn't need to make any special efforts to adopt the platform, our NPM build was working from day one. I think we come for the deployment, but we stay for the quality of the customer service. It is technically competent, human and accessible."

"At Clever we know better what we're going to have as a machine in front of us and we're on bare-metal: an application that is on Heroku, will necessarily go twice as fast on Clever."

Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

How did the migration go?

Damien: "GIT PUSH… That's it! We stacked things up one by one afterwards. The biggest change was adding Cloudflare and it really changed the performance of our Node server and our Wordpress."

Why use Clever Cloud?

Damien: "If you are already on another PaaS, your application will surely be faster by migrating it to Clever. And if you already have a build/deployment that is continuous and automated, you will have no effort to migrate. It costs nothing to try!"

If you too would like to test our solutions, create your Clever Cloud account or log in with your Github account here and get 20€ of free credits.

Surprise as it often happens: the report that was made on your company two months ago is going to be programmed tomorrow evening. Or, in the middle of a hot topic, your product is going to be the subject of an item during the 8 o'clock news.

The TV appearance is always a bad match for the web: because when you size your IT infrastructure, it's more to manage your growth over 3 years. On a nice upward curve, usually linear. And when the traffic peaks by 800%, your architecture will be on its knees.

Except with Clever Cloud. Configuring your applications to absorb a traffic spike can be done with a few clicks in the interface:

Only, managing site traffic is easy when you are already hosted by Clever Cloud. But if this is not the case, there is no fatality.

Yesterday, M6 broadcast the show "Who wants to be my partner? And the young company BioDemain, which helps agricultural producers during the three years of their organic transition, took part. Hosted on a traditional architecture, the risk of the service falling down is great. So we helped BioDemain migrate their site to Clever Cloud in less than 24 hours!

How Clever Cloud handles these traffic spikes

First of all, managing site traffic will be done on the Clever Cloud side by load-balancers before reaching your application. These load-balancers (formerly HAProxy instances, and now instances of Sōzu, an in-house software) are going to distribute the traffic among themselves. Just like if you had Amazon ELBs (Elastic Load Balancer), except that here it's included by default, and already configured.

Your application will then receive the traffic. Depending on your scaling configuration, your application will be able to trigger alerts to our monitoring system if CPU and RAM increase. And therefore multiply the number of instances. Load-balancers and multiple instances in a few seconds: and you are ready to handle the traffic.

The migration itself

To move to Clever Cloud so quickly, we were put in touch with the BioDemain team. And it was the formidable support organisation that was at their side to migrate their site (here a Wordpress) from a shared solution to Clever Cloud. Despite a rather… tight schedule.

The recipe for success was a very quick migration. Indeed, there are two ways to deploy your Wordpress on Clever Cloud:

• Quickly, with a simple FTP transfer.
• More elegantly, using git for the code, Cellar for the media and Composer for the plug-ins.

Obviously we went for the first solution.
After contacting the developer of BioDemain, the first step was to transfer the files between the old host and Clever.
Several tens of thousands of files, so in FTP it takes time.

While waiting for the end of the file transfer, our team and BioDemain were able to deploy two other instances: MySQL and Redis. Then came the configuration of the PHP application itself (still during the transfer).
Here we had to:

• Activate ProxySQL to mutualize the application connections
• Configure proxySQL via simple environment variables:
  • CC_ENABLE_MYSQL_PROXYSQL=true for activation
  • CC_MYSQL_PROXYSQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS =15 to set the maximum number of connections to be managed
  • CC_MYSQL_PROXYSQL_USE_TLS=true if needed
• Make a dump of the original MySQL database and import this dump into the new one
• Enable the Redis session in PHP via environment variable].

Extra tech tips

• You can also enable the Varnish built into Clever Cloud if you feel like it:
• Put in a CDN: if you don't have time to optimize your SQL queries, caching strategies, minifications etc., CDNs are there to offload some of the traffic to them.
• Before anything else, lower the TTL of your CNAME and A records of your domain name. At the time of migration, if you are short of time and the changes to the domain name are propagated over 24 hours, you will find it a shame.
• And if you ever have a down, redirect your home page to an application that displays a contact form: users can then leave an email to be contacted again.

Finally, evaluate the performance. The fateful moment of the TV pass does not suffer from a single oversight. To do this: JMeter locally (beware, it requires resources), or great online services like gatling.io

You have all the cards in hand for the next step :) Good luck!

The year 2021 was marked by the arrival of the covid 19 vaccine. A hope for many, announcing the end of this pandemic that will have marked the beginning of our century. Haha. Well, actually, no. Indeed, on the eve of the year 2022, we discover the fascinating capacity of the variant named Omicron to spread. Vaccination campaigns then resume, to inoculate the so-called "booster" doses to stem this new wave of contamination.

Hey, we'd like to help

At Clever Cloud we are trying to act - in our own way - in the face of the situation. As was the case previously with Makair (the respirator co-designed by our CEO Quentin Adam), for example. And, at the beginning of the school year 2021, we came across the Covidtracker teams almost by chance. They were in the middle of working on Vite Ma Dose. This was an opportunity to discuss their needs. And since the beginning of the fall 2021, we have been providing instances for the algorithms of the Vite Ma Dose. To goal is to detect vaccination appointments.

With the ViteMaDose volunteer team, we are investing our time to serve a vaccination campaign that we believe is essential for our fellow citizens. Fortunately, we are not the only ones: several French public services and companies have also lent a hand to the product by contributing the know-how of their teams or access to their technology. This is the case of CleverCloud, which has generously offered to help us by hosting the core of the product: the algorithm for finding vaccination slots for covid-19.

Florent Jaby

A short story of migration

We are delighted to be able to help the Vite Ma Dose teams today. We provide the necessary resources to enable the service to function properly. As much as the frontend is quite simple, the backend, which aggregates appointments from a small number of different platforms, is a different story.

Clever Cloud offered us hosting specific to our needs and our architecture thanks to its managed Gitlab Runner offer. We were able to entrust them with all of the operational complexity of the platform, which otherwise required our constant attention, not always possible in a voluntary capacity. This also frees up our time for other matters such as the progress of the 3rd dose of vaccination or the vaccination of the youngest children, which are changing daily. In fact, the migration to the Clever Cloud runner was completed in a weekend, painlessly and perfectly as planned.

Florent Jaby

Today, the service is running like clockwork. We congratulate the Covidtracker and Vite Ma Dose teams for their efforts.

To find your 3rd shot : https://vitemadose.covidtracker.fr

Christmas is next week and you probably heard about the “Secret Santa” tradition. Loïck Piera, Web Consultant at JoliCode, developed an app called Secret Santa to help you organise yours with your colleagues, friends or family. Secret Santa has been hosted by Clever Cloud since 2018.

What is a Secret Santa?

In a word, Secret Santa is a Christmas tradition where each person of the group is randomly assigned someone to offer a gift to, and nobody knows the author of the gift they will receive until the D-day.

How does the app work?

It allows you to simplify the organization of your Secret Santa. In other words, it automates the assignment of a person to whom to offer a gift for each participant. Of course, to simplify its use, you can connect the app to Slack or Discord and now a beta version for Zoom is also available.

How to install Secret Santa?

• At first, go to their website, then choose the application to which you want to connect Secret Santa.

• Next, select the group members you would like to add to the participants. In addition, you can also set-up a personalized message to send to each participant.

• Then, you're all done, the app shuffles and assign each participant to another one and sends the message you previously set-up. Finally, all you need to do now is to buy the gift for the person you have been assigned to! 

Why did Secret Santa choose Clever Cloud?

We asked Loïck Piera, the Web Consultant at JoliCode which developed the app, what he thinks about the solution we provide. This is what he replied:

Clever Cloud : "What are the main assets that made you choose to be hosted by Clever Cloud?"

Loïck Piera : "Well, it's a solid platform which operates without having to overthink it and with no need of maintenance from our side. It's simple and fast to deploy in production, and there is no service interruption, which is crucial. Secret Santa is a Symfony application with PHP 8 and the Clever Cloud infrastructure fits our needs perfectly."

Clever Cloud : "What do you appreciate the most in our solution?"

Loïck Piera : "What we appreciate the most in this hosting solution, is the simplicity of use. We only have to indicate the webroot directory, and that's all, the version of PHP and the Composer dependencies are detected automatically! Furthermore, there is also an interesting list of addons. Clever Cloud is a platform really adapted to most web projects."

Interested in learning more about our solutions? Visit our technology page.

A rapid increase in activity… without any stress

Antoine, how did you experience this atypical period for your company?

With this rapid growth, have you been worried that your infrastructure will saturate?

Clever Cloud service allowed us to be very calm despite the threefold increase of our activity.

What’s coming for Shopopop?

“We had to build something super robust because it must not crash with customers; everything is tested, very solid, this is one of the reasons why we use Clever Cloud.”

Why did you choose Clever Cloud for this project?

Separated work, better concerns

Performance and Confidence

Costs Reasons

Friendship and Innovation

More than ever, we realize that our world is late in some ways. Technology can be a real strength, a time-saver, a life facilitator, particularly in the medical sector.

Founded eight years ago, Ubilab is a software range for medical testing laboratories. This ergonomic solution groups together all the tools that laboratories will need for internal communication towards healthcare professionals.

Ubilab has two essential products: Ubilab Home and Ubilab Result. Ubilab Home is for professionals, and Ubilab Result is for patients. These products are mainly technological: software in saas, web, and mobile access, company filled with developers directly from the Scala world.

Meeting with Guillaume Badin, CTO at Ubilab

Tech has an essential place in our company; our product is technological. My job is to code, not to manage servers, that’s why the offer of Clever Cloud meets our needs. This year we will launch Ubilab results and visit, and we need to accelerate the deployment of these products in laboratories.

“As a CTO, my role is to foster interaction between developers, internal communication, and allow the team as a whole to be more efficient.”

My team is organized around poles; we have a front pole and a back pole, we organize around tasks performed, our objectives are to deploy new functionalities rapidly. The idea is that we test it every time, and it goes into production. My challenge is to develop tools to make the whole team go faster and to help developers grow daily.

How did you hear about Clever Cloud

I discovered Clever Cloud via the Scala world, at a Scala IO conference. I had the opportunity to eat next to Quentin Adam, we discussed my issues, and it made me want to test your platform.

Before we were with Rackspace, we had to manage our servers ourselves; it was time-consuming, the updates were complicated; there was no security update. The idea of ​​pushing its code and making it easy to deploy won us over.

“Being able to push and test quickly allows us to implement new features more regularly.”

Now that we are at Clever Cloud, the deployment works very well. We like the culture of Clever Cloud, which brings a lot to the community. Support helps us when we need it. Clever Cloud has changed the way we work; we are now doing pre-production which makes us gain in quality.

What changes with Clever Cloud ?

• Push into production every day
• DevOps time reduces by 95%
• 2-3 hours earned per week
• A lot of serenity

Once upon a time, two founders encountered a problem, and they solve it. Clément & Augustin wanted to invest in an apartment in Paris: a real pain trial. You need to be available 24/7, to check on every website the new property advertisement, to be the first on the deal, to be the first to sign it.

They had to find a solution and help future buyers. And then comes the idea of a chatbot in messenger. Thanks to this simple feature, first users were able to enter their criteria: budget, location, number of rooms, etc. Then they receive in real-time tailor-made suggestions. As in every good startup story, the beginning is not that simple. Behind this chatbot on messenger was hidden founders, doing everything by manually, without any automation, picking the right data via Google searches.

The end of Manually Scrapping

Then came the time to hire a real tech expert, Julien Pouillard, actual CTO at Folhomee. When Julien arrived two years ago, he had to automate the entire process. The first things were to implement a database to record every data correctly. Secondly, to develop a search system to pick data and criteria from each advertisement on properties websites. Lastly, Julien had to set up the matching between user needs and on-line ads to create a real virtual property hunter. They use machine learning to favor easy user matching, widening the selection with optional criteria. Now they can analyze vast volumes of data, and use it to extend the matching with variables.

Since Julien joined Folhomee, the company use Clever Cloud as a hosting provider. After having tested several alternatives like Heroku and AWS, Julien heard about Clever Cloud. For many years, he uses Clever Cloud for professional projects.

"For me, Clever Cloud is the simplest, fastest, and the most efficient platform for Startups."

Folhomee uses Clever Cloud to run their apps, to see metrics and logs, for their Databases with MongoDB or Redis for all the add-on part. They have several instances per app: it's interesting to see the log overlapping.

"It's easy to contact the support; I can reach them anytime, and it always went well!"

Julien is the only one who handles the infrastructure part, and recently another collaborator; Maxime Amore, student apprentice, has deployed another application and a database on it:

“For Maxime first use of the platform, I gave him access to the entire Folhomee infrastructure. He could discover logs and carry out maintenance on the applications. Then when we needed a new instance, he was in charge of creating the app and the database. This initation was swift and easy.”

Now Maxime is using Clever Cloud for personal projects and master Clever Cloud platform.

Julien, how would you pitch Clever Cloud?

Clever Cloud is the application deployment platform that allows for continuous deployment with the implementation of databases or other add-on.

Thank you, Julien, for your time and much success to Folhomee!

The idea comes from Alexis Delepoulle, one of the founders of Energic. He was the CEO of a company in energies (specialized electric meters installation), and customers were unable to pay their electricity bill. The initial objective of the app was to reduce user energy consumption to allow consumers to spend less.

He met Quentin Oustelandt, a student passionate about this subject, and they launched with Tristan Reneaume Energic. Their genesis: buildings technical efficiency must be paired with the evolution of usages to create the best environmental impact possible.

Since 2019, Energic has evolved to raise awareness among its users to all environmental concerns (energy at first, and then mobility, food, waste, digital usage, lighting, water…) with clients like Orange, Cofidis, Crédit Agricole…

A team of 11 people — 140 000 sensitized individuals — 1M objective sensibilisation for 2021

An app full of tools

To make behaviour evolution easier in companies and schools, Energic has developed a digital challenge built around the main environmental stakes. Energic core business is eco-responsibility. Thanks to a mobile app, they create a community within the company: the app allows them to exchange, set goals, monitor the progress, and their efforts.

A facilitator supports each community to give them advice, animate the use, and follow their consumption.

“All of our team at Energic have the spirit to change things. Everyone feels concerned about ecology; we are glad to work for a company whose match with our convictions.”

Meeting with Jonathan Lecointe, CTO at Energic, in the company since the beginning

Initially, at Energic for his Bachelor Internship, Jonathan was one of the two first dev in the company. He continues his way with work-linked training to finish his studies. At the same time, as the Energic tech team was growing, he became the CTO naturally thanks to his expertise on the project.

“I’m not a partisan of a steering policy. My purpose is to make sure that the dev team has all the fundamentals in place to do their jobs in good conditions and goes in the right direction.”

The willingness to protect data in France and a need to be scalable in the technology

Their first server was auto-hosted on OVH, but no one in the team was a system administrator. They met then the need to find another way to handle security and monitoring. They were looking for a solution in compliance with their ethic: Data protection is a real matter for Energic; it was not practicable to store the data in the US.

“We were looking for a local solution, and Damien Cavailles from WeLoveDevs recommended Clever Cloud to us. The first thing we liked about Clever Cloud was the possibility of horizontal and vertical scalability.”

So Jonathan, more than three years since your first use of our solution, how Clever Cloud impact Energic way of work?

The beginning was straightforward. I’m a back-end developer; I just had to create a remote, push my code to it, and it was settled. We had a few hiccups because Scala support can be complicated sometimes. However, Clever Cloud’s support is still there when we have a problem; everything is transparent. Overall, the price for the service is genuinely fair. And the support team is friendly, available, even educator.

This year, our main challenge is to ramp up our commercial level. We launched a version 2.0 last May, and as of now, our product is improved and ready. We still need to work on our architecture to be scalable. It’s essential for us to feel safe about scaling: we sometimes have a prominent peak of activity, and Clever Cloud servers can adapt. My function is not to handle security, maintenance, or monitoring. I’m peaceful to let it in Clever Cloud specialists’ hands. Clever Cloud speed of deployment is truly comfortable. For the fun fact, earlier this day, one of my front-end collaborators needed a feature back: it took me like just 30 seconds to do it!

How would you explain Clever Cloud in a few words?

Clever Cloud is a great solution to host servers easily, the configuration is remarkably fast, the support is excellent, and mostly, it’s a French company.

Thank you Jonathan for your time!

More information on Energic.io

Clever Cloud: mission statement

Clever Cloud: our services

And voila: our new logo

Fun fact: about stickers

// tl;dr
$ git mv logo_v1 new_logo_finalfinal (WAIT WHAT?)
$ git commit -m "We haz New Clever Cloud Logo (and more)"