We have spoken with Robert Bousquet, an experienced business consultant, full stack web developer, and the co-founder of an awesome company called, New Leaders. New Leaders recently moved their infrastructure to Cloud 66.
Background
For those who haven't heard about New Leaders before, they build powerful mobile and web applications to automate a business and move their operations online. New Leaders have already helped hundreds of businesses create, refine and position web-based products and services to improve company performance, employees effectiveness and customers happiness.
The secret to New Leaders success stems from years of experience, choosing the right combination of great technologies, and collaborating closely with clients to deliver the best possible return on their investment.
Robert answered a few questions about New Leaders and Cloud 66.
I understand that you used to run your own Chef scripts across 30 AWS accounts prior to switching to Cloud 66. Could you tell us a bit about that setup and what made you want to switch?
The team at New Leaders has been building and hosting Rails applications since 2005 through a number of different hosting providers (self-hosted on OSX Server, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace, Heroku and AWS) and server configuration solutions (deprec, Heroku, Chef, etc). It feels like we’ve tried them all at one point or another.
Our most recent stack was built on an elaborate Chef Solo codebase that incorporated many of our hard-won best practices and could carry an application from the prototype, through launch and into the horizontal scaling phase of growth. It was a powerful system but increasingly time-intensive to manage and curate over time. We wanted to re-focus all energies on application design, development and business rules of our clients, so we started looking for a replacement.
How did you hear about Cloud 66 and why did you choose to move to Cloud 66?
A number of our team members had used Cloud 66 for personal projects and after a short evaluation period, and test migrations of some of our more complicated applications, we chose to consolidate all of our paying Heroku and Chef-managed servers to Cloud 66 and Amazon Web Services. Many of the best practices we had established previously were already built into the platform including full application SSL, redirecting WWW requests to the apex domain, load balancers, backups, etc and we appreciated the one-click configuration of most of those features.
Did you have any issues with migration to Cloud 66?
Initially, Cloud 66 allowed you to use any number of cloud providers, but only stored one account credential for each. After sharing our agency use-case with the Cloud 66 team (each of our clients have their own AWS account and we have management access), they were quick to rollout the minor change to support our needs. This customer support experience further illustrated the Cloud 66 team was sincerely dedicated to covering our entire stack.
What is your experience with Cloud 66 so far?
We’re a little over halfway through our mass migration and things are moving smoothly. We plan to complete the migration by the end of the month. We’ve already seen a reduction in developer time to manage changes to these applications (rolling out Memcache analysis of logs, replacement of SSL certificates, etc) and have experienced a reduction in expenses related to DevOps activities.
How did the move to Cloud 66 affect your performance, efficiently and monthly hosting bill?
The raw hosting costs have remained similar to our previous setup but now enjoy a reduction in management overhead. The Cloud66 platform was very much inline with our needs as veteran Rails developers which allowed us to quickly adopt the platform and re-allocate the gains in team performance to the unique business needs of our clients.
What are your plans for the next 6-12 months? And have you thought about using the containers in the future?
New Leaders are currently designing, building and preparing to launch a number of new web and mobile applications powered by Ruby on Rails. We plan to use our recent gains from the Cloud 66 migration to ramp up product development over the next several months but are keeping our eye on the evolution and adoption of container-based deployment.
We see a lot of potential in the Container as a Service (CaaS(i)) architecture that’s taking shape.
Is there anything you would like to add?
New Leaders is currently hiring experienced Ruby on Rails developers and UX designers to join our team. The New Leaders work environment features rapid prototyping, opportunity to learn about many different industries and a dedication to quality and excellence that will inspire you to build produce some of your life’s best work.
The Cloud 66 team is extremely happy to work with the awesome guys at New Leaders. We would like to say, thank you to Robert for finding a spare time for the interview with us. We are excited about New Leaders onboarding and our future collaboration!