Case Study - SaaS Delivery Solution for Sales based start-up
Pipelyft is a UK-based startup developing a data sovereign sales engagement platform for a global market.
- Client
- Pipelyft
- Year
- Service
- Intelligent Business Middleware
Overview
Launching a SaaS application into a competitive market on a tight budget is tricky business; making the right technical calls is critical and can be the difference between making or breaking. This is why we were proud when Sales Engagement start-up Pipelyft asked us to help them distribute their product to the world.
Unlike traditional SaaS applications, where all tenant data is stored and accessed from the same location, the ambitious vision for Pipelyft was that every customer would have their own separate, fully isolated version of the application running in a data region of their choice, allowing their clients to comply with data legislation more easily.
Pipelyft wanted to achieve this without spending thousands of pounds up-front on their server infrastructure. This goal led to increased technical complexity in the hosting and delivery model, as each application instance needed to be provisioned on demand based on each client's needs in a cost-effective manner.
DGxC helped Pipelyft build a complete end-to-end SaaS delivery model, from point-of-sale on their customer-facing website, enabling them to accept payments via their preferred payment platform, all the way through to utilizing a combination of GitLab pipelines, custom-built Intelligent Business Middleware, and leveraging our expertise in cloud-based hosting.
The result was a deployment and revenue model that allowed Pipelyft to eliminate financial risk while providing a seamless onboarding process for their clients.
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The problem
To stand out from the crowd, the team at Pipelyft wanted their offering to focus on data sovereignty and security. As such, they decided to take a radical approach to how and where the applications were deployed and hosted. Each client receives an entirely separate infrastructure stack, including a physically separate data store, deployed in a geographical data region of their choice.
The Pipelyft team was determined to keep their initial infrastructure overheads at zero and develop a solution that allowed any incurred costs to be scalable and predictable, and crucially, remain in line with their revenue generation.
This highly secure, data-sovereign, and financially flexible approach came with a host of complicated technical obstacles to overcome.
- Consistency when provisioning at scale.
To avoid support headaches and service disruptions when deploying applications at the scale Pipelyft requires, it is crucial to guarantee that you are deploying the same application and supporting architecture consistently, every time, in every location.
- Ensuring insight and control.
Without oversight and the ability to control all running instances of the Pipelyft application en masse, the Pipelyft team would soon encounter an administrative bottleneck that would be a massive drain on development resources.
- Onboarding new customers.
The most crucial aspect for the Pipelyft team is the ability to quickly and reliably spin up new instances of the application autonomously, ensuring that new customers enjoy a smooth onboarding process.
What we delivered
The DGxC technical team first got to work by figuring out how to reliably deploy the same application, with the same operational architecture, potentially thousands of times. We quickly identified that a containerised approach using Docker would be our best option to ensure consistency. Our first port of call for containerized hosting solutions is always our Cloud Hosting Partners, amazee.io, and Lagoon, their highly scalable and flexible, open-source application delivery platform.
The DGxC team, experts in all aspects of cloud hosting environments and specifically Lagoon, quickly worked with the Pipelyft development team to curate a build pipeline in their GitLab account. This pipeline pre-packaged and versioned the entire Pipelyft application, enabling quick and consistent deployment to the Lagoon platform. It was essential for us to ensure that the Pipelyft development team was included in the project and, as a by-product, learned how to use and maintain the final system.
Once we had successfully built and deployed the application consistently, we switched our focus to working out how the Pipelyft team would manage their running instances and automate the deployment of instances for new customers.
We quickly realised that it was the perfect space for a piece of our Intelligent Business Middleware that would be responsible for:
- Providing insight.
Listing and detailing all live instances of the Pipelyft applications so that they could be easily monitored and modified.
- Smart updates at scale.
Bulk updating live Pipelyft applications on Lagoon to the latest version based on the geo-location of the applications themselves to minimise disruption.
- Application delivery.
Deploying new instances of the application to Lagoon, both manually and autonomously, when a new subscription was purchased via the Stripe payment system.
The resulting Intelligent Business Middleware application (named "Floodgate" by the Pipelyft team) became the focal point of the system, orchestrating all of the complex moving parts into a seamless user experience for both the Pipelyft team and their clients.
The final piece of the puzzle was to help the Pipelyft team integrate Stripe with their customer-facing website, enabling them to accept new subscriptions for their product.
The final system built by DGxC was a combination of all the things we excel at: solid digital strategy, deep knowledge of technical and business processes, and robust custom software, all culminating in a system that provides Pipelyft with a sustainable revenue generation system to propel them forward as a business.