We are a company that designs, builds and optimizes digital solutions. With a unique blend of continuous development, user research and agile coaching we have the power to grow, retain and engage with our clients.

We have been on Upcloud for quite a while already. Originally we had our hosted projects around different hosting platforms, but when the number of services started to grow we decided to focus on one preferred platform that we would recommend and offer to our customers.

Previous challenges
Despite some previous vendor specific issues, the largest challenge was our heterogenous hosting environment. Utilising multiple different vendors forced us to develop multiple solutions to the same problems.

When we decided to look for a better option, our requirements focused on a fast and reliable infrastructure, and the available hosting locations. Mostly due to some of our clients requiring hosting specifically in Finland with others more widely in Europe. Good support and a fully featured API to automate as much as possible of the management process were also high on our list of priorities.

Hosting on UpCloud
We are currently running over 200 cloud servers of varying configurations. Most of our hosts utilise between multi-core servers depending on the workload intensity. Along with the multitudes of servers, we are also taking advantage of terabytes of MaxIOPS storage, most of which is secured using scheduled backups.

With so many servers in operation at any given time, we’ve developed in-house a management tool stack called WunderTools. The tools are based on Ansible and utilise the UpCloud API for server operations. We use our tools extensively to provision our infrastructure and have made them available open source.

Improvements
Our projects vary greatly between implementations, therefore, infrastructure is something we want to keep unified. Thankfully, UpCloud has proven to be flexible enough to allow us to adapt to different needs with minimal effort.

In addition, their new regions have enabled us to offer the same hosting solution in more locations. Where before we had to rely on multiple local hosting providers due to regulations, we can now handle all in one cloud. Concentrating on a single provider has made our work a lot easier as we can use the same platform everywhere.

While our path hasn’t been completely problem-free, we are happy with the overall quality and performance. Compared to many other options, we have been able to offer competitive pricing to our customers.

Future plans
We are looking to utilizing managed solutions for services like database and Elasticsearch that support Bring-Your-Own-Access approach. Integrating such managed services across different vendors would be very helpful. Furthermore, transitioning into using container-based hosting solution that can be used across UpCloud and customer premises. For example, running centralized Kontena masters on UpCloud while having customer application on premises if required.

New services that we want to see on UpCloud would be automated server scaling and virtual private cloud.