As Start.io scaled-up massively, GlobalDots assisted with its migration to a complex, hybrid Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Start.io worked with GlobalDots to find a cloud provider that will meet its exceptional engineering requirements (alongside business needs) – to have unlimited scale with modern GitOps approach and capabilities to build its infrastructure with the existing high standards.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) ended up being the unorthodox solution suggested by GlobalDots. There were several reasons behind this recommendation. The most important was that GlobalDots knew OCI would provide more flexibility to meet Start.io’s unique technical and business requirements, than the company would receive from one of the Big Three clouds. This flexibility was particularly important, considering that Start.io’s engineers didn’t want to rebuild their hosting environment from scratch in order to migrate. Instead, they wanted to lift-and-shift the environment – which consisted, to mention one example – Rancher Kubernetes clusters – into the cloud without having to overhaul it. That would have been difficult on a conventional cloud, whose Kubernetes services are not designed to be directly compatible with Rancher’s Kubernetes distribution.

“GlobalDots analyzed our entire estate and provided us with a cloud provider recommendation based on our specific needs,” said Motti Shpirer, VP Infrastructure & Technology at Start.io. “We came in with very specific requirements, which meant we needed a flexible solution that other cloud providers couldn’t deliver, surely not in an easy way”.

Alongside flexibility, OCI offered more compelling pricing for Start.io’s needs. One huge benefit is that OCI doesn’t charge for multiple availability zones. That meant that Start.io could spread its workloads across multiple zones to increase reliability, a key business goal given the company’s commitment to delivering a top-notch customer experience. Combined with the fact that OCI’s services are competitively priced, this advantage strengthened the appeal of Oracle.

In addition, thanks to the introduction by GlobalDots, Oracle engineers were made available to Start.io, and helped their team plan the hybrid-cloud migration step-by-step – as well as validate it at each stage in order to catch and fix issues before proceeding.

“That’s a huge benefit from a business perspective”, Shpirer said, as it means Start.io can now accommodate customers with less predictable traffic requirements. As proof, he mentioned a new client whose needs were initially expected to require about a 30% increase in load capacity for Start.io’s infrastructure, but which turned out to double the request rate. Thanks to the scalability and flexibility of the new hosting environment, that higher-than-anticipated demand was easy to meet – whereas it would have been a nightmare for the company’s previous infrastructure.

What makes the value of Start.io’s move to OCI even greater is that the company completed the migration with minimal disruption. With GlobalDots’s help, as well as assistance from the OCI engineering team, Start.io’s engineers planned a seamless migration process that allowed them to turn off their bare-metal server environment and turn on their new cloud-based clusters without a hitch.

“We took highly measured steps,” Shpirer explained. “Every time we moved something to the cloud, we made sure everything aligned and coordinated from A-Z. Often, when you move between vendors, you get a very complex process, but in our case – thanks to falling under the GlobalDots umbrella – the move was exceedingly smooth”.