Upheal, a Czech-American startup developing an app to facilitate the work of therapists, was looking for a reliable partner for comprehensive management of its AWS infrastructure. Based on recommendations and previous knowledge of the company, they chose Revolgy, and now, after several months of working together, they evaluate their cooperation as the right step forward.
Let’s look at the added value of delegating part of the company’s operations to a partner like Revolgy.
Infrastructure management is easy to delegate to a partner
Before Upheal acquired a partner in Revolgy, the overall infrastructure management was up to them, including monitoring and alerting. It was taking up more and more time, and since it was not a key competence for the growing company, they decided to seek support from a partner.
“Within our small team, it makes more sense to focus on the main topics of the company’s operation, i.e., the product development that brings real value to our customers. Infrastructure management is not one of them; moreover, it can be very nicely delegated to a partner. It is cheaper, faster, and with better results,” says Martin Horváth, CTO of Upheal.
“At first, we were a bit cautious about what to expect. We considered several options, including working with Revolgy or finding an internal person responsible for infrastructure management. But now we all consider it a very good step and decision. The Revolgy team is great to work with, and everyone is professional,” adds Horváth.
Strengthening infrastructure management is very important from the point of view of overall security and personal data protection, which is absolutely key for our type of product.
— Martin Horváth, CTO, Upheal
As a company, Upheal is now experiencing rapid growth, and Revolgy is helping to adapt the infrastructure to scale and effectively serve its growing customer base. Revolgy has taken over activities that they would otherwise have to invest their own resources in, and thus the cooperation saves both time and money.
The cooperation with Revolgy has two levels: incident management and operations management. “In terms of incident management, it is beyond our capabilities to respond to infrastructure problems 24/7, and as we continue to grow and scale, we are hitting the limits of our infrastructure, and Revolgy helps us solve problems effectively.” Within incident management, Revolgy also guarantees a response within 15 minutes of receiving a problem report, covering periods outside of regular working hours and without unnecessary stress for the customer.
More companies are switching to managed services from a partner
“We took over the overall management of the infrastructure from Upheal, including proactive prevention of problems and cost optimization. More and more companies are switching to managed services, and we definitely see a clear trend in this now and in the future. We have experts who have built and managed dozens of different infrastructures and know how to do it. It is a great feeling to stand by the side of fast-growing startups,” says Roman Rozbroj, Account Executive for Revolgy.
“The Revolgy operations team deployed alerting on the infrastructure, which is a combination of our monitoring solution and Upheal’s existing alerting, which we are constantly improving and deploying new tools to ensure oversight of the infrastructure. Application monitoring works similarly, and if it is an application problem, we escalate it to Upheal and then look for a suitable solution together,” says Tomáš Veliký, Operations Team Leader at Revolgy.
“We have a shared Slack channel where escalated alerts pop up, around which communication with our team takes place,” says Horváth. “We have regular syncs once a week and go through the priorities that need to be addressed from a DevOps perspective, for example, what needs to be changed or improved on the infrastructure. We started with a long list of things we didn’t have covered. Gradually, we have set priorities, and now we regularly go through and reduce the backlog we had prepared for onboarding. There is also ad-hoc communication and meetings on specific topics, such as disaster recovery.”
Cheaper, faster, and with better results
Tasks falling outside the company’s core competencies are delegated to external services that employ experts and take care of everything.
— Martin Horváth, CTO, Upheal
“For example, we recently had an exercise in disaster recovery, or the ability to restore infrastructure during an outage, as required for SOC2 compliance. Together with Revolgy, we prepared scenarios and exercises and simulated a system outage in a controlled manner. We then tested how we were able to restore the individual components effectively,” says Horváth. “If we had dealt with disaster recovery ourselves within Upheal, it would have taken us much more time, as we would have had to find out everything on our own, and it would not have been of such high quality. But Revolgy already had experience with it, so we were able to prepare and play the whole scenario.”
“Outsourcing infrastructure management was a clear choice for us. Tasks falling outside the company’s core competencies are delegated to external services that employ experts and take care of everything. It simply does not pay off for us to recruit a DevOps specialist,” adds Horváth.
“We primarily serve the American market and need to make necessary infrastructure changes outside of the US working hours. We, therefore, also benefit from the time zone difference, as we can easily make changes during our working hours, not affecting our primary market,” adds Horváth.
However, cooperation with a partner has other advantages, too. “As for the cooperation with Revolgy, we do not have to deal with time allocation or the complex calculation and payment of worked hours. The model is cleverly linked to our cloud spend. We do not have to worry about how much time Revolgy spends on work. This is a very pleasant way of working together because it eliminates the need for us to have a complete overview of their involvement.
It also has financial advantages for us. If we wanted to do things internally, we would have to be a much larger company and ideally have several people for both incident management and DevOps. With the same quality and work done, everything would definitely cost us more.”
About Upheal
Upheal is a Czech-American company founded by Juraj Chrappa and Martin Horváth that has won numerous awards and investment opportunities. It operates primarily in the US mental health and health-tech market. Thanks to its focus on automation and digitization of psychotherapy processes, Upheal helps streamline the work of therapists and allows them to dedicate themselves to clients with greater care and attention. Upheal thus opens the door to more accessible and effective mental health care for the general public.
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