Buink, a web development agency, builds cutting edge web and mobile apps for small and medium businesses. Buink deploys different infrastructure setups on DigitalOcean and AWS with Cloud 66 Maestro.
Buink Background:
Buink is a web development agency founded in 2009 by Ben Buie. It helps small and medium businesses to create and maintain web and mobile applications. The agency has vast experience working with a variety of different technologies such as JavaScript, Docker, PHP and Cloud 66 to name a few. Beside providing cutting edge technologies for its clients, Buink also offers help in picking technologies that make business sense for its clients. Buink has structured its business on the following values: cost-effective, eloquent and maintainable code, and responsive, transparent communication.
Buink products: Buink offers a set of web development services that can help improve any business:
- Web development - specialised in web or mobile applications (both, back-end and front-end).
- Web design - bring your owner web designer and use Buink for the technical side of your website.
- Lead developers - Buink provides access to experienced developers who will be able to lead your team to success.
- VP of engineering - a consulting service that enables you to find the best resources for projects under a fixed budget .
- Database architecture - support in building and maintaining databases.
- Code architecture - code architecture is the foundation stone of any web application. Buink provides expertise and insights into which architecture is right for your project .
- Streamline development - Buink provides access to experienced developers who can jump right on a project within 25 minutes without any prerequisite knowledge.
- Web maintenance - once your application is deployed, Buink takes care of the maintenance of your applications.
Who is using Buink : Buink is a great solution for small and medium-sized businesses which need help with the development of web or mobile applications. They have helped thousands of companies, including Reebok, MyNiceTie, Pilatus, Herc-u-lift and many more. The company has satisfied clients in many different environments.
How to get started : To get started with Buink get in touch with Ben directly via online@buink.biz, or call at 844.317.TECH.
To find out more about Buink I got in touch with the CEO, Ben Buie. Ben can you tell us more about Buink and your experience with Cloud 66?
As a Web Development Agency can you give us an overview of your business needs?
We’re a small but growing team of developers and, as such, we need to engage skilled partners to deliver the level of quality and value that our clients desire.
In recent years, web development has become increasingly specialized and it can be challenging to stay cutting edge with everything from the server to the browser.
We quickly realized the value of a solution to help us manage servers so that we could continue to focus on writing killer front-end and back-end code.
Already using docker to develop locally, we wanted to extend our local dockerfiles to build and deploy other environments (QA, Staging, Production). The benefits of this could be huge!
We also knew we needed a partner that could simplify the devops process and help us not to make common mistakes.
Cloud 66 was among a number of solutions we researched and tested but it was the only one we could get to work on our first try. We signed up for a trial, plugged in our existing dockerfile, and within a couple hours we had a working prototype running at DigitalOcean. Sweet, sweet victory!
This was 5 years ago, back in the early days of Kubernetes, and we don’t remember the other solutions that were on the table at the time, but there weren’t many.
We’ve since refined our process and moved exclusively to a goal of “infrastructure as code”. Cloud 66 has been a vital partner with that goal. Since that first trial, we’ve used Maestro to build several web applications and APIs.
What is the Buink infrastructure setup? Why did you decide to use Kubernetes?
The infrastructure setup we recommend to our clients involves a local dockerfile that is extended by a production docker file which we build and deploy using Cloud 66 Maestro. We typically deploy to DigitalOcean as a hosting provider but we’ve also deployed to AWS as well.
We didn’t actually decide to use Kubernetes and we actually knew nothing about it at first. Cloud 66 handled, and continues to handle all the heavy lifting related to Kubernetes; that is one reason we love Maestro!
There are many other things we love about Maestro, here are a few:
- It allows us to deploy with the push of a button.
- It allows us to switch easily from one cloud provider to another.
- It allows us to run an almost identical environment from local all the way to production.
- It allows us to control the build process very easily with Habitus.
- It allows us to spin up new environments easily.
- It makes it easy to add on services like SSL certificates, load balancers.
What projects have you run on Cloud 66?
Project 1 : A streaming video-on-demand service that leverages a plethora of third-party APIs to sell transactional video and stream that video over the web. This project uses Cloud 66 to build and run the api as well as deliver the front-end client code.
Project 2 : A budgeting web and mobile app that teaches people to be more defensive with their money and allows them to budget and track expenses in an ingenious way. This project uses Cloud 66 to build and run an api and deliver the front-end client. The api is also consumed by an IOS app that uses the exact same front-end code as on the web.
Project 3 : A business admin web app for an equipment rental company. This web app and api uses Cloud 66 in an identical way as project 2 except it doesn’t have a mobile app yet.
The list could go on! Cloud 66 is perfect for all the above projects because it allows us to manage our infrastructure as code to build and deploy these projects.
Is there anything that you would like to add?
The book “The Marketing Agency Blueprint” mentions that agencies need to focus on efficiency if they are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century. Even though Buink Web Development isn’t the typical agency, we’ve found that efficiency is the key to value and Cloud 66 is definitely part of our efficiency secret sauce. Cloud 66 helps us reduce the cost of building, deploying, and maintaining servers for our clients and that helps us increase the value we provide.
We’re excited to work with Cloud 66 to continue to provide high value, quality code to small and medium sized businesses.
Thanks Ben!
It was great to catch up with Ben Buie from Buink and learn more about the setup of a development agency. Ben, thank you for finding the time to discuss your work and your experience with Cloud 66. It's always a pleasure to discover all the unique ways in which our customers are using Cloud 66 products.