DevFactory Case Study

2016

DevFactory is a Dubai-based provider of software and services founded in 2008. A spinoff of Trilogy Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held software companies, DevFactory develops software solutions for global enterprises. The company relies on extensive standardization and automation to eliminate manual processes and optimize costs.

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We can be very agile in how we operate using AWS. We can easily make changes on the go in terms of scaling resources up or down. That helps us respond faster to new acquisition opportunities whenever they arise."

Aditya Datta
COO, DevFactory

The Challenge

DevFactory is growing rapidly as it acquires many companies every year. To ensure it meets its growth goals most efficiently, DevFactory requires business agility. “We need technology that enables us to be very agile in how we operate, so we can efficiently respond to new business opportunities,” says Aditya Datta, COO, Gteams for DevFactory. “As part of that, we need to have the capacity to scale compute and storage resources up and down as we need to.”

Like all businesses, DevFactory also strives to manage its operational costs efficiently. As a lean organization, the company constantly looks to innovate in processes and software to meet that goal. In addition, once it acquires new companies, the organization requires the ability to quickly transfer customer data to the DevFactory platform. Because this often involves transferring large data volumes, which is time-consuming, the company looked for ways to complete the data ingestion process faster and more cost-effectively.

Why Amazon Web Services

As an early adopter of new technologies, DevFactory determined that a cloud-based platform was the best solution to host its customers’ applications because it offered the best combination of agility and cost efficiency. Once the company decided to use the cloud, it chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its platform. “We were one of the early adopters of AWS,” says Datta. “We strongly believed then—and continue to believe today—that AWS is the best technology for our industry.”

DevFactory started by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to support SaaS applications for customers. “AWS gave us the agility and scalability we needed as we started growing,” Datta says. As part of its ongoing cost-optimization efforts, the DevFactory team then evaluated Amazon EC2 T2 instances, a low-cost, general-purpose Amazon EC2 instance type that delivers a baseline level of CPU performance while providing the ability to burst above the baseline when needed. “The Amazon T2 instance types were an ideal alternative for balancing low cost with performance for operations such as web servers and small application servers,” says Datta. The organization currently runs more than 30 customer applications on AWS, taking advantage of burstable T2 and other EC2 instance types.

To address its fast data transfer requirements, DevFactory also started using AWS Import/Export Snowball, a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large data amounts to and from AWS. To date, the company has used Snowball to transfer thousands of virtual servers totaling at least one petabyte of customer data. Most recently, it began using Amazon RDS for Aurora, a managed MySQL-compatible relational database engine designed for speed and reliability. The organization currently uses Amazon Aurora to host customers’ productivity management, channel management, and project management applications.

DevFactory has started evaluating AWS CodeCommit, a fully managed source control service to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories, for some DevFactory products. Using CodeCommit DevFactory can host application source code for its acquired companies in a central location and then save money by eliminating the need to operate its own source control systems or infrastructure.

The Benefits

Using AWS, DevFactory now has the business agility it needs to continue growing. “We can be very agile in how we operate using AWS. We can easily make changes on the go in terms of scaling resources up or down,” says Datta. “That helps us respond faster to new acquisition opportunities whenever they arise.”

DevFactory has also been able to significantly reduce its operating costs. “We were able to cut our costs by up to 65 percent for one of our accounts by efficiently switching to Amazon T2 instances,” says Datta. The company saves additional money by using Amazon Aurora. “Amazon Aurora allows us to have a much more reliable database in the cloud, at a substantially lower price, with marginal amounts of oversight required on our end.” DevFactory is using these savings to grow its business. “With the efficiencies we get using AWS, we can grow at a rapid pace in our industry,” says Datta.

The organization can also migrate new customers to the DevFactory environment up to 60 percent faster than before by using AWS Import/Export Snowball. “We’re extremely excited about the potential of Snowball,” says Datta. “It helps simplify and speed up the process of transferring our new customers’ data, and it’s especially helpful in situations where we need to move a petabyte of data in a short period of time. Our company moves aggressively, and we don’t want to wait months to get a data connection between a customer data center to AWS. We can do it seamlessly and quickly using Snowball. Our expectation is that as it matures in the near future, Snowball will significantly boost our ability to move new acquisitions to AWS at a much faster pace.”

Ultimately, DevFactory is helping SaaS companies become more profitable by migrating them to AWS. For example, both DevFactory and its customers no longer have to manage and procure hardware or have large support staffs. “Using AWS, we are confident that we will continue to innovate and grow in the years ahead,” says Datta.


About DevFactory

DevFactory is a Dubai-based provider of software and services founded in 2008.


AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

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Amazon EC2 T2 Instances

T2 instances are a low-cost, general purpose instance type that provides a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline when needed.

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AWS Snowball

Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses devices designed to be secure to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud.

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Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud.

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