BACKGROUND

Bloomz builds school communication platform that goes by the same name. It is designed to coordinate, communicate and share real-time information among teachers, parents and the PTA. With over a million users Bloomz has been experiencing explosive growth since the start of the 2017 school year and has been adding new educational institutions every day.

CHALLENGE

Helped by its rich functionality, the Bloomz platform gained wide popularity and attracted a broad customer base. This, in turn, resulted in increased feature requests. As the teams ramped up the development of features across the system, they encountered severe constraints imposed by their shared "QA and Staging environment". In order to deploy the changes - the Dev, QA and Ops had to coordinate continuously. This resulted in the following setbacks:

• slowing down the teams
• delaying the release of features and
• reduction in productivity across all levels

All of which that Bloomz could have ill afforded in their growth phase!

ALTERNATIVES

Bloomz was considering setting up multiple QA environments. This was not just expensive but it also proved to be time-consuming since it required managing multiple dependencies. In addition, setting up and operating parallel environments required technical expertise that would consume the already scarce engineering team's hours.

As Bloomz started looking for ideas from DevOps service providers, they found that either the service providers lacked the experience to work with a complex system such as Bloomz or were very expensive with long timelines and proposed shifting away from Bloomz's existing development workflows.

CLOUDACCEL SOLUTION

• CloudAccel designed and built an automated build and deploy a solution that could launch the Bloomz application in Cloud in under 2 minutes
• Using proprietary processes and tools, CloudAccel delivered the solution not only within the budget but also ahead of schedule
"Within weeks of taking on the project, CloudAccel team identified the bottlenecks in our deployment process, rolled out an automated build and deploy solution, eliminating bottlenecks and providing much-appreciated productivity boost" - Chaks Appalabattula, Founder & CEO, Bloomz

BENEFITS AND RESULTS

• Each team/members can launch their own isolated customizable version of the application
• The on-demand environment costs just a couple of pennies an hour towards cloud charges
• Bloomz senior engineering team spends 50% less time on deployment related tasks
• The waiting time for a new change that is spent by QA, UI and Dev teams is reduced from 24+ hours to 2 minutes
• With the elimination of shared contentious environment, the PM and other senior management spend zero time tracking and sequencing deployments through shared environment

"CloudAccel has been a great partner to Bloomz and we look forward to their expertise in further enhancing our Cloud setup and operations"