Engine Yard, Inc.

Get Satisfaction Saves on In-house Ops Costs and Gets Scalability with Engine Yard

The Opportunity:

Get Satisfaction offers a customer service platform to help companies respond to customers’ questions, feedback, concerns, and praise no matter where the conversation is taking place across the social web, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Companies benefit by taking advantage of crowdsourcing and communities to engage customers, raise customer satisfaction, and reduce support costs. Over 40,000 customer communities rely on Get Satisfaction to be their social CRM platform. Get Satisfaction customers include many of the who’s who of consumer and enterprise brands: Zappos, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Mint.com (Intuit), and Autodesk.

With 5 million customers per month generating millions of monthly page views, scalability is a priority for Thor Muller, Get Satisfaction’s CTO and Co-founder: “Because we’re growing so fast, we needed a platform that would be able to keep up with our rapid growth rate and reduce the time and expense of infrastructure management and slow deployment times that we had experienced with a dedicated infrastructure provider. We practice agile development, so cloud computing was very appealing. It’s critical for us to be able to scale our system to meet our needs as our business changes.”

In response to evolving market opportunities, Get Satisfaction continually analyzes and adjusts their business offerings. To accomplish this, the company requires highly flexible infrastructure and platform capabilities. “We need the flexibility to make infrastructure investments in response to how the business grows. Deploying our application to the cloud — not directly investing in hardware or heavy-duty architecture on the system side — allows us to right-size our investment for growth,” explained Thor.

Get Satisfaction chose to develop their applications with Ruby and Rails because Thor believes there are several benefits to using the fast growing language and framework. “Rails offers more than just pure speed. We know it’s faster to develop an initial working product in Rails, so prototyping in Rails made a lot of sense. As we worked more with Rails, we realized it was also ideal for our work style and the types of personalities we wanted developing our product — particularly because our established developers liked the elegance of the Ruby language and Rails framework. We saw the following additional benefits to using Rails: agile methodology, test driven, behavioral methodology, better code, reduced risk, and more visibility for the business. Those considerations were much more top of mind than pure speed,” Thor said.

With the decisions made to develop in Ruby on Rails and deploy to the cloud, Get Satisfaction began to search for a cloud computing platform capable of meeting their needs.

The Solution:

Get Satisfaction wanted a cloud platform that would offer scalability, affordability and Rails expertise. Engine Yard met all of these requirements and represented Get Satisfaction’s vision of what a Rails-based application stack should be. “The combination of technology and domain expertise in Ruby on Rails made selecting Engine Yard an easy decision for us. We knew they would work with us to achieve our scalability goals because scalability is the sweet spot of Engine Yard AppCloud,” said Thor.

As Get Satisfaction prepared for their migration to the cloud from their dedicated infrastructure provider, they relied on Engine Yard for their expertise in scaling rails applications and ensuring their application was tuned to scale and meet their growth targets. “We knew from research that it was non-trivial to get efficiencies running in the cloud and be able to achieve the scalability we needed. We’d heard from other Rails developers that the Engine Yard support staff was top notch, and our experience confirms it. They have expertise in cloud computing and Ruby on Rails apps specifically, so we rely on them with confidence to help us with planning, migration, and 24/7 support,” added Thor.

As a fast-growing start-up, Get Satisfaction wanted a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider who would grow with them while providing expert Rails advice. “Cloud computing is an emerging technology category, so we wanted to work with a company that is also evolving quickly because there’s so much happening. Engine Yard is the vanguard of creativity for Rails development, and because we work so collaboratively with them, we know their advice will help us to optimize our applications today and take into account what’s coming in the Ruby on Rails roadmap,” Thor said.

Results:

Get Satisfaction has been running on Engine Yard AppCloud since January, 2010 and realizing the benefits of affordability, ease of deployment, higher performance and scalability, and 24/7 support. Most importantly, the company is confident that Engine Yard provides a platform with proven scalability and is prepared to handle their continued growth.

Get Satisfaction cites the affordability of Engine Yard AppCloud pay-as-you-go service as a primary driver in their success of lowering infrastructure and deployment expenses. “Running on Engine Yard AppCloud, we can plan our expenses much more easily. Plus, performance is much higher than it was before, and we can scale up smoothly with our needs. We’re not over-provisioned which means we’re saving tens of thousands of dollars a month. We also have more data about every piece of our app and the overall operations than we’ve ever had, so we can project costs relative to our growth much more accurately,” said Thor.

With the ease of deployment on Engine Yard AppCloud, Get Satisfaction has been able to save on the cost of an in-house operations team. “We don’t have any full-time operations people. This is a direct result of running on Engine Yard AppCloud. In the old days, I would have had 2 full-time people managing infrastructure and application deployment. That’s a big savings that we’ve been able to reinvest into expanding our core development team, allowing us to deliver more features that our customers want — and to do it faster than ever. Someday we may need a full-time operations person, but I haven’t done it yet because deployment on Engine Yard AppCloud is so easy. I can add a new server with one click,” said Thor. Get Satisfaction has also realized cost savings due to the expertise and experience Engine Yard has in scaling Rails applications. “The proactive advice of the Engine Yard team in terms of tuning our app for performance and scalability has been a huge win. They have a world-class combination of cloud and Rails expertise that I don’t know if you can find at any other company,” Thor continued.

Get Satisfaction relies on Engine Yard support to help them proactively identify and resolve deployment issues whenever they arise, giving Thor and his development team peace of mind. “With premium support, we have someone who is a first responder and is prepared to take action when standard ops issues come up. That kind of support has real value because it takes a lot of psychological load off my development team, so they can focus on building new features,” explained Thor.

As Get Satisfaction continues to grow their business and innovate with new features on Facebook and Twitter, they see Engine Yard as a key part of their plans. “We consider Engine Yard to be an extension of our team and will continue to rely on their expertise and the scalability and affordability of their cloud computing platform as we grow our business,” Thor concluded.