Blue Voice is an AI-driven company providing first responders with crucial, up-to-date information during emergencies. Instead of sifting through outdated manuals, law enforcement personnel use Blue Voice to inform real-time decisions based on the latest laws, policies, and best practices.
Developing the minimum viable product on Heroku
Blue Voice's initial prototype was developed on Heroku, a decision driven by the platform's simplicity. As their needs grew, Heroku's limitations became apparent. Simple migrations became challenging, and the deployment limits significantly impacted their delivery speed. Recognizing these constraints, they decided to migrate to AWS for more flexibility and scalability.
Migrating to AWS: Manual Processes and Lack of DevSecOps Expertise / Technical Debt
As a small team of ML/AI engineers and app developers with limited DevOps expertise, Blue Voice struggled with AWS. They relied on a third-party vendor to deploy services on EC2 instances, which led to several issues:
- Manually SSHing into machines.
- Building container images manually without a robust version control system and audit log of release notes.
- Managing SSH keys and credentials manually.
- Prolonged deployment times, often taking hours.
“No one ever wants to take on technical debt, but DevOps is unfortunately the technical debt that everyone takes on because you’re just a resource-strapped team. If I had another $250,000 a year, I would obviously hire someone to do that, right? But I just didn’t have that.” - Amit, CTO of Blue Voice.
The Turning Point: Discovering Kapstan's Internal Developer Platform
The team was struggling to keep up with their DevOps and infrastructure needs. They were spending long hours trying to understand AWS’s complex landscape.
So, they started evaluating various solutions, including Kapstan.
After watching Kapstan’s demo, they realized it was the perfect fit for their needs, covering everything from code to build, deploy, and monitor. Kapstan’s promise of an abstracted, user-friendly deployment system intrigued Blue Voice.
The Blue Voice team met with Kapstan’s experienced team of engineers. Once all of their technical questions were answered, the choice became clear. Blue Voice could spend limited resources to hire a dedicated DevOps engineer, or they could use Kapstan for a fraction of the cost.
Amit, the CTO of Bluevoice, shared an interesting story about convincing the CEO and other non-technical stakeholders to use Kapstan. He explained:
“ The decision is whether I should handwrite the paper (do it myself or hire a devOps engineer) or use a printer (deploy using Kapstan). But I have an assignment (product launch) due in six weeks, and I don’t have the capacity to handwrite this., There is already a typed-up solution which we can print right away.”
Successful Implementation: Transforming DevSecOps with Kapstan
The transition to Kapstan was swift and impactful. Blue Voice's deployment process transformed from a manual, error-prone task to a streamlined, one-click operation. This change eliminated the need to immediately hire a dedicated DevOps engineer, saving substantial costs and reducing technical debt.
The Blue Voice team loves working with Kapstan for the following reasons:
- Increased Deployment Frequency: Blue Voice moved from sporadic, stressful deployments to regular, daily deployments, including off-cycle deployments as needed. It’s as easy as a single click.
- Fine grained control and ease of configuration: The team now has fine-grained control over CPU and RAM compared to Heroku where they didn’t have the ability to adjust available resources within a given dyno type.
This also gave them the flexibility to towards true microservices architecture because it’s so easy to spin up new services.
Initially, document processing involved a long-running text extraction process within the main API service, which hindered scalability and risked losing extraction jobs during scaling. To address this, the text extraction was separated into a low-provisioned, stable service. This change allowed the API service to become a fully scalable, standalone entity. This transformation would have been daunting without Kapstan, as bringing up another service, maintaining the complex YAML for Kubernetes, and managing another service manually in EC2 would have been impractical. - Frank, lead engineer, Blue Voice
- Zero Major Production Bugs: Kapstan let’s you replicate environments in a single click. This helped Blue Voice create an exact replica of the production environment. A reliable and thorough testing environment ensured that issues were caught in development, preventing critical bugs from reaching production.
- Observability Features - Real-time Monitoring and Log Management: Kapstan's observability features further enhanced Blue Voice's operations. The platform provided comprehensive monitoring, real-time live logs, and efficient log search capabilities, enabling the team to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. These features were crucial for maintaining system reliability and performance, providing visibility into the health and status of their applications.
- Rapid Feature Turnaround: Blue Voice landed new customers because of the speed with which they delivered features. One of their largest customers was surprised to have a request catered to within days instead of months, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and giving Blue Voice a competitive edge.
“Kapstan is a SaaS product for the DevOps engineer role. When you do something manually, you’re guaranteed to miss something. The fact that it’s programmatic gives us peace of mind. If something does go wrong, it’s very clear what went wrong. That’s the biggest thing Kapstan offers: reliable, consistent DevSecOps SaaS.” - Amit, CTO, Blue Voice
Future Confidence with Kapstan: Scalable and Reliable DevSecOps
Kapstan has been a game-changer for Blue Voice. By adopting Kapstan’s Internal Developer Platform, Blue Voice not only overcame their DevOps challenges but also significantly enhanced their operational efficiency.
Blue Voice experienced a dramatic increase in deployment frequency, improved system reliability, and a faster turnaround for new features. These capabilities have resulted in increased customer satisfaction and improved developer experience helping Blue Voice maintain a competitive edge in the market.
If you’d like to learn how Kapstan can help do the same for your team, reach out to talk with one of our engineers.
