Business strategy and technology company uses Databarracks for AWS consultancy

“Our sole focus is on the commercial interests and challenges of our clients. We offer expert support to solve those problems and we are completely independent. As a result, we often put together clusters of third parties to deliver the best solutions for our customers,” - Dr. Peter Chadha, DrPete’s founder and CEO.

The Relationship

Databarracks have been providing DrPete and their customers with AWS infrastructure services for over six months now. “Databarracks have become a trusted third party for us,” said Dr. Chadha.

“As with all of our projects, we assessed both Databarracks and AWS using our RASERS framework for: Reliability, Auditability, Security, Extensibility, Robustness and Scalability. “They’re flexible enough to bring in for self-contained projects on an ad-hoc basis when a customer of ours has a specific requirement. We can know Databarracks have the expertise to deliver, cost effectively and quickly. “Our customers want to use cloud computing to save money and improve their efficiency. Databarracks have been able to help us do that. We’ve been very impressed by the team at Databarracks.”

The Challenge

Databarracks has emerged as DrPete’s partner of choice for AWS services, enabling the consultancy to take on bigger and more challenging projects. “For instance,” said Andrew Logie, Senior Consultant at DrPete, “we had a particular E-commerce project for a multi-national, venture capital backed company with no CTO, no programmers and no DevOps people.

“The customer had a need for a full scale, professional development environment, but they were a start-up and were pre-revenue, so needed to keep costs as low as possible. The site needed to be architected in a way that it would be able to scale up very quickly to deal with huge traffic volumes as soon as the project went ‘live’.

“At DrPete, we supply the expertise in application design but we needed to find a company who understood how to build and support this type of infrastructure. AWS is the perfect platform for this sort of project –it’s fantastic for E-commerce sites where the focus is keeping costs down while building demand.”

The Solution

DrPete engaged Databarracks for Design & Build and Manage & Support services on AWS. “Databarracks set up a number of different servers – Dev, UAT, Live, Management and MySQL RDS. We are running across multiple availability zones in EMEA. We got a professional standard development environment for our customer at less than $200

per month and zero upfront, capital costs.

“Databarracks’ expertise is in helping us setup the environment in the right way in order to make the most savings. This could be using a large database, for example, rather than several smaller instances for a particular project or the correct architecture to run cost effectively when demand is low.

“The team at Databarracks is fantastic, they are close to the developers, but also are able to give really solid advice. We are able spin up servers quickly, but where Databarracks really add value is at the O/S and security level. “Using Databarracks, we get ‘virtual Sysadmins’. Our developers don’t need to get near the machines they are working on. Our developers can just develop and Databarracks takes care of

the infrastructure.”

The Benefits

“The big benefit to us when we use AWS and Databarracks is that we don’t have to be prescriptive about resources when demand is uncertain. In the past, we would have to guess at traffic and demand levels, months or years in advance – which is incredibly difficult for projects like this with start-up technology companies.

“Customers are really excited when they see how low their costs

will be during development and when growing demand. They do often get frightened by the uncertainty that costs will go up when demand increases. Databarracks are able to provide some solid estimates for costs which really help alleviate those fears and help forecasting.

“I have worked in hosting in the past, and I always thought ‘wouldn’t it be great to just have access to all of the development tools, but not manage the infrastructure’ – thankfully, using AWS and a partner like Databarracks, we’ve achieved just that.

“We are an independent advisor, so our customers will have a support contract directly with Databarracks. We will be brought in to help with the project from inception to delivery but after that –we won’t be involved anymore. The customer will still need support, and we’re happy that with Databarracks – our customers will be well looked-after.”