PeopleForce is a smart HR management platform that helps small and medium sized businesses to build a high-performance working-culture. PeopleForce chose to deploy their infrastructure on Linode with Cloud 66 for Rails, after reviewing Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk and Doku.
PeopleForce Background
PeopleForce is an all-in-one human resources (HR) software service for SMBs that helps automate and centralize HR management. The company was founded in 2018 with a mission to help companies build a high-performance culture by simplifying and optimizing HR processes. Their unique selling point is to be ‘people focused’ - they put people first because people are the heart of every business.
PeopleForce Products are designed with every team member in mind. They help your team to get more productive and lead your business to success. This is how the platform can optimise your team:
- HRIS Software (PeopleHR) - PeopleForce Human Resource Information System. Use a single cloud system for all your employee data and HR processes.
- Application Tracking System (PeopleRecruit) - makes it easy to post job openings and create hiring teams to collaborate on candidates.
- Employee Surveys (PeoplePulse) - create scheduled surveys to monitor and analyze employee engagement and satisfaction through extensive analytics and find out key drivers of success.
- Employee performance evaluation (PeoplePerform) - oversee efficiency: set OKRs, schedule 1-on-1, collect 360-degree feedback, see the history of each performance review to track progress, benefit from advanced HR analytics
- Time Tracking (PeopleTime) - spend less time on tracking and more time on doing really important things. An easy way to track payments for your hourly based employees and remote workforce.
- Integrations - an easy integration with systems that you already use. PeopleForce is the only HRM that has powerful integrations with Azure DevOps, Jira, Trello, Telegram, LinkedIn and GSuite.
PeopleForce is also available via a mobile application for on-the-go HR management.
Who is using PeopleForce? PeopleForce is a perfect solution for small & medium businesses. No wonder that companies like Soft Construct, SE Ranking, ARX, Strivetech, Snov.io, Vitis Group and many more trust and use PeopleForce.
How do I get started? Sign up for a 14-days free trial or get in touch with them directly via contact@peopleforce.io.
To find out more about PeopleForce I got in touch with the Managing Director, Andrew Cetinic. Andrew can you tell us more about PeopleForce and your experience with Cloud 66?
Can you give us a short overview of PeopleForce’s business needs?
PeopleForce has been growing very quickly since 2018 where our business needed to react quickly to the growth and the changing demands from our customers. During this period we needed to choose a technology partner that would help us in the following key areas:
- Our technology stack is built as a Majestic Monolith using Ruby on Rails. Needed first class support of Rails with great documentation.
- We are committed to having a small team, and didn’t want to have our own dedicated DevOps resources.
- Hosting flexibility. We preferred to have flexibility in choosing cloud providers and an extra bonus was to be able to supply our own VM’s to point and deploy to.
Prior to making the decision to use Cloud 66 we investigated the following providers and our reasons for why they didn’t meet our expectations.
- Heroku. Very popular within the Rails development community as a simple, easy way to setup a Rails application. We experimented with Heroku in the past but found that the pricing gets very expensive quickly for production workloads and the restricted access to ‘dynos’ using shared infrastructure made it difficult to utilise external libraries and perform more lower level operations.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Using Elastic Beanstalk meant that we would be tied to the AWS cloud and development on Beanstalk is actually not as simple as they promote. Configurations can get very complicated and it meant that we most likely would need to hire or contract a DevOps developer to help support environments.
- Dokku. Open source library that is inspired from the behaviour of Heroku but on your own servers. I love this library, however I felt not quite production ready and it still meant that we would have to have our own DevOps to support environments.
So then we found Cloud 66. When I first experimented with Cloud 66, I was shocked about how simple but flexible it was to meet all the requirements we were looking for. I simply pointed our Rails app to our Git repository and a test environment was up within minutes. Passenger, Sidekiq, redis, postgres, elastic search all running without any extra configuration... on our own servers!
We chose Cloud 66 because of the flexibility it provided us, and it meant we could focus our efforts on developing the product, not deploying it.
What is PeopleForce's infrastructure set up?
Our current technology stack is as follows:
- Ruby 2.6.6 / Rails 6.0
- Postgres 11
- Sidekiq
- Elasticsearch
- Redis
We utilise multiple stacks within Cloud 66 for the following environments:
- Development
- Staging
- 2 x preprod
- Multiple Production - separated by region/customers
Using the ‘clone stack’ feature of Cloud 66 means we can just create new environments with ease on a new server for some pre-production feature testing, or even setup a new production environment on our customers BYO servers.
This would have to be my favorite feature of Cloud 66. Using our own custom servers means that we get the benefits of the Cloud 66 ecosystem but deployed to VMs that we can have in any datacenter. This allowed us to sell our product into customers who wanted to have PeopleForce running in their own datacenter.
What is your experience with deploying on Linode with Cloud 66?
Cloud 66 has been very easy for us to use and we didn’t find any situation that wasn’t easily resolved by reading their clear documentation or contacting their support.
We have been blown away by Cloud 66’s support. They are a team of highly technical engineers that always have come up with solutions when we need it.
The biggest business benefit I see of using Cloud 66 is that we don’t have to hire any DevOps specialists to manage our infrastructure and deployments. The ecosystem is simple enough for developers to use, and coupled with their support it means we can just focus on product development.
Is there anything that you would like to add?
In 2020 we are planning to expand into new markets and grow our development team to support new features that are currently in the works.
PeoplePay is a new module that we are working on which is aimed for release later this year, will be our new payroll module. PeoplePay will help our customers perform payrolls, track bonuses and benefits of their employees.
Thank you, Andrew, for finding the time to chat with us about PeopleForce infrastructure. It's always fantastic to discover all the unique ways in which our customers are using Cloud 66.