Customer Success Story : BlackSwift

About company

BlackSwift provides services to help development teams to deploy their containerized applications effortlessly. We provide an all-inclusive package : security, monitoring and backups in a ready-to-use Kubernetes namespace. This allows our clients, mostly NoOps teams, to leverage the benefits of Kubernetes without the complexities and time required to manage it themselves.


BlackSwift is fully aware of today’s technical challenges as a French company, such as data sovereignty and Green IT. We therefore had to strictly adhere to these two criteria in choosing our infrastructure partner.

Moreover, we have always aimed for excellence : low-cost providers surely allowed us to stay within budget but absolutely did not comply with our standards in terms of reliability, High Availability and security best practices. Incidents were multiplying and we were left alone to deal with service disruption of various Cloud Providers. Most of the time, we received no information from support teams and we sometimes had to wait several weeks for our tickets to be addressed. We were desperate to find someone to communicate with, a true partner that would really care about and handle our technical and business issues.

Solution

We have structured our architecture around several key products from Scaleway to address our specific needs in deploying and managing Kubernetes environments efficiently:

• We use Elastic Metal servers for their scalability and cost-effectiveness, allowing us to test new configurations and scale operations flexibly, from hourly tests to monthly intensive use, optimizing both our R&D costs and ROI. Our Scaleway architecture is perfectly flexible and scalable : the number of machines constantly adjusts over time and according to our clients traffic peaks.
• For load balancing, we chose Scaleway's Load Balancers because they uniquely offer multi-cloud capabilities, essential for supporting our multi-provider Kubernetes clusters. This feature has been crucial in maintaining high availability and seamless service continuity across different cloud environments.
• We also use Scaleway's Object Storage for its cost-efficiency and rapid deployment capabilities, which are vital for managing the large datasets required by our clients. This storage solution supports our Kubernetes namespaces service, ensuring data resilience and rapid scalability.

Scaleway was our first choice as they combine all the advantages we were looking for.
They are a major French Cloud actor, thus ensuring data sovereignty and compliance with French and European regulations. Our servers are strategically placed in the FR-PAR-2 zone, whose datacenter is carbon neutral. Scaleway also provides a robust Cloud solution that handles perfectly well the demands of highly available and secure Kubernetes environments. What is more, their reliable and performant machines are available at a very competitive price, particularly with Elastic Metal’s hourly billing.

And last, but not least, we were delighted with the support and communication team. Whenever we opened a ticket, we were consistently called back by an engineer. We were able to have real technical discussions with the Scaleway team, express our expectations and our business needs. Whatever the issue, having a partner you can talk to is pure gold.

Results

By integrating Scaleway's solutions into our architecture, we've optimized costs and reinforced resiliency significantly. Using Elastic Metal servers allowed us to cut our technology expenses by approximating the optimal configuration for each use case, resulting in a 30% reduction in overall infrastructure costs.
Additionally, the deployment of Scaleway's Load Balancers with multi-cloud capabilities has increased our service uptime, enhancing resiliency by ensuring that our applications remain available and responsive under various conditions and through traffic peaks. This strategic architecture has not only supported our operational goals but has also underpinned our commitment to sustainability:** 100% Scaleway servers we are using are located in energy-efficient datacenters or engaged in carbon offsetting.** BlackSwift is proud to work hand in hand with Scaleway to reduce our technologies’ carbon footprint.