UK-based crowdfunding platform Crowdcube has signed up to Rackspace's Managed Cloud to help its aggressive growth plans without the high costs of employing a whole team of DevOps engineers.
As Crowdcube began to expand into new territories with new innovations and the growing popularity of crowdfunding as an alternative finance option, it became clear the company's IT infrastructure was letting it down.
The website was slowing as daily traffic increased and downtime was resulting in lost revenues. It was clear the answer was boosting the company's infrastructure and introducing new processes to enable swift responses to growing technological demand.
“We knew we needed to expand our DevOps capabilities,” said David Ives, head of technology at Crowdcube. “But we didn’t want to incur the cost employing a DevOps Engineer."
After meeting with Rackspace, the answer was clear: to continue using Crowdcube's existing engineers to build the application and growing the business, while Rackspace's services would be utilised to keep the current functionality running smoothly.
“It was exactly what we needed,” Ives said. “Suddenly we had the equivalent of 10-15 DevOps engineers at our disposal, which I wouldn’t have been able to do internally.”
He added that Rackspace's Managed Cloud also offered an impressive service component on top of the infrastructure, which was also a major selling point for the company.
Crowdcube is currently rebuilding its application from the ground up and is expanding its engineering resource as a result. After launching mini-bonds earlier this year, it has a lot more features to announce in the future, as well as some big clients coming onboard that will rely on a stable platform in order to hit funding targets.
“We currently offer investment opportunity in 270 businesses, we’re about to hit £100 million in funds raised and we have just under 200,000 registered users,” Ives said. “There is no way we could have handled that sheer volume on the setup we had prior to working with Rackspace,” Ives added.
"The extensibility and scalability that we’ve been able to attain with the platform are major factors in my confidence that we can provide the business with the future growth we have planned."
