Case study: Sprout Social opt for IaaS from day one to support the growth of demand

Sprout Social offers a platform of management and participation social media for social enterprises. The putting into operation with headquarters in Chicago, IL wanted to focus on developing and refining its product, the founders was with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) of 1 day. The decision freed the company of a large part of the IT planning and predictions that consume resources in traditional environments.

To IaaS day 1

Aaron Rankin, co-founder and director of Sprout Social, explains why the company chose IaaS.  "From the beginning we had a startup recruitment. When you pay your own money, you don't want to have to spend more than you have to. We did it for the type of flexibility that it offers. Day 1 we didn't want to predict exactly what our needs would be 1 day or even a month. If you don't have to plan something, then it is not to have to do and is happy to meet demand - that is what gave us the infrastructure as a service offering. Basically we are all in demand." Another reason cited for choosing IaaS as a solution: HP regarding how much you pay.

Technological solutions

Sprout Social started with cloud (formerly Mosso) sites. According to Rankin, "back then 3-4 years, there was nothing with the amount of scale for the cost and turn-key as it is. So it is something like plenty of room in a box, and you don't have to worry about setting up all components."

From the outset increase exceeded Social Sprout systems scalability, to move databases in large dedicated systems was the fastest solution available. The Social platform sprout now relies on a flexible infrastructure hybrid of Rackspace. The infrastructure includes:

Hybrid files hostingDedicated serversRackConnectPublic cloudCloud block storageCloud backupCloud

Because the Sprout Social platform processes and stores large amounts of heterogeneous data at different frequencies. By design, the system keeps similar details together, making it easy and cost-effective to deal with complex storage and performance requirements.

"In our company, we have two engineers who manage all of our servers," said Rankin. "It turns out that they are former employees of Rackspace. We have an account manager at Rackspace, a technical leader and some other people who are dedicated to our account. If we have a serious problem, beam took absolute hours. Call Conference very early in the morning when the hardware has failed and that sort of thing".

Best growth through IaaS

Rankin talks about the company is a little early days, "so, as a technology startup, we don't think much about infrastructure. We focus on the product and the people to use it all. As it is typical, we knew that we had passed the hardware that we were staying because the site was constantly slow."

Adds, "it was clear from our own use of the site and the follow-up that we had reports from users who we needed to grow our infrastructure. "Back then, weren't very calculated respect - only crept upon us". Sprout Social now has more formal control of sites and processes mechanisms in place.

Vs cost-saving opportunities

"We have not done anything to draw our operational savings, but that is something that I'm beginning to think now, especially in the last year," said Rankin. "Our growth has been great, and our accounts have remained with that. For the moment, we are beginning to look at Rackspace private cloud offering, because it would give us much more control. "It should really help us cut our Bill enough."

Adds: "the logic behind us using [IaaS] was not saving directly. If we know exactly what needed and bought it and attempted to hardware ourselves and made a capital expenditure or even leased from Rackspace, we could probably save money, but we're in this because we want to change things on demand. A team of developers of my morning you can tell me that we need ten machines for something with cloud servers that you can literally rent. We can do so immediately. There are no deadlines or procurement process. Just turn them, and are ready to go. There are, of course, the value for the business. It's more than the creation of opportunities for cost savings."

Lessons learned

Rankin and his team have learned many lessons from IaaS to go first. It begins with "the cloud is not perfect. "People love to make cloud as always if the thundercloud."

Rankin continues, "unless you are actually using running on all the physical machine and how much it takes to do it, because it is not transparent, then you have neighbors." Don't know who they are their neighbors and do not know you. Things could be misbehaving. When that happens, it will affect."

"Should always build their systems to be tolerant even more, even more resistant, even more if it would have full competence of [it] was their situation of hardware and systems are running along with other systems." "We have bitten the cloud so many times, but we have only built for it, and we have taken some technologies that were built technologies that expect hardware to fail or obtaining and explanation on the fly".

"The cloud is not a silver bullet," Rankin recalled.

Conclusion

Rackspace cloud platform hybrid allows Sprout Social to focus on product development and its core business, allowing implementation underway expand its infrastructure to meet the demands of its growing customer base.