Hostersi Helps Tidio Boost Reliability of Customer Service Platform with Migration to AWS

Tidio helps small and medium-sized businesses support online customers with a customer service platform that includes live chat, chatbots, and helpdesk services. A steadily growing company, it saw demand rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. It decided to migrate to AWS to meet demand with a scalable solution. When migration planning proved more challenging than expected, Tidio turned to AWS Partner Hostersi, which helped create a migration roadmap. Since completing the migration, Tidio hasn’t experienced any infrastructure-related incidents. It has also expanded its use of machine learning and infrastructure as code (IaC), and can quickly roll out new services.

Tidio, a Poland-based startup founded in 2013, was steadily growing and saw demand for its services continue to rise when the world embraced online shopping early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The company provides a customer service platform with automated and artificial intelligence-powered products such as live chat, chatbots, and helpdesk services for small and medium-sized businesses looking to support their online customers. It decided to replace its existing hosting service with a more scalable and highly available solution.

To improve scalability, Tidio had started working to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web  Services (AWS). This involved lots of testing to minimize the risk of service interruptions for customers. To help that effort move forward, AWS suggested that Tidio work with AWS Partner Hostersi, a specialist in migration, DevOps, and digital customer experience consulting. “Thanks to Hostersi, we were able to increase the speed and kickstart the migration process,” says Kamil Kopaczyk, head of infrastructure at Tidio. “This was really helpful.”

Since completing its migration to a new environment on AWS, Tidio can now roll out new features faster while maintaining high availability. Knowing that it has a reliable and scalable infrastructure to depend on, it’s also planning to expand its use of machine learning for customers. It currently supports more than 510 million unique users around the globe.

Hostersi kicked off the migration effort by hosting a workshop to discuss AWS capabilities and services with Tidio’s small infrastructure team, which at the time included four engineers. “Hostersi’s AWS presentation was really phenomenal in terms of covering so many topics in a short time,” says Kopaczyk. “It covered how AWS works, what the services are, how it’s built. It wasn’t only a simple introduction, but contained practical knowledge and caveats—from basic to advanced topics—all in a very compressed, but easy-to-understand, format.”

Next, Hostersi began working with Tidio to build a roadmap for migration, assess needs and gaps, create a high-level architecture design, and outline what needed to be done during each phase. That included testing several different scenarios to identify the best way to address Tidio’s concerns about reliability and scalability. Tidio took advantage of the AWS Startup Migrate Program, which provided it with funds to offset the cost of both Hostersi’s consulting work and the first months of AWS infrastructure usage.

During migration planning, Tidio used Slack to communicate with Hostersi on a regular basis because work took place remotely. “We could talk to them at any moment,” Kopaczyk says. “It felt like we were in the same office.”

Hostersi worked with Tidio to configure the new environment on AWS, using infrastructure as code (IaC) and gradually letting the team take over coding as the time for migration approached. It worked to optimize and modernize how Tidio handled workloads using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload—and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It also prepared to deploy Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for serverless, fully elastic file storage and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which helps to distribute network traffic to improve application scalability.

Hostersi also provided regular feedback about what to expect during the migration and focused most of the preparation phase on testing to minimize risks and make sure everything would work as planned. The migration, which went smoothly, took place during a 2-hour window on a Monday—one of the quieter days for ecommerce, meaning the downtime would have less impact on customers.

Since completing the migration to AWS, Tidio has eliminated its previous infrastructure concerns. It can now focus on improving its existing infrastructure and delivering value faster, and has gained the confidence to expand its use of services such as machine learning. Kopaczyk says that having a reliable cloud foundation has also allowed Tidio to make greater use of IaC and dynamic testing environments on Kubernetes. “We can now set up dynamic environments in minutes and bring changes to market fast,” he says. “We are happy with how it turned out. It just works.”