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“Prodvana has laid down a robust foundation, allowing us to easily manage our production services for the foreseeable future. Its intuitive workflows and flexibility help us confidently scale alongside our business growth.”

- Willy Wu, Head of Engineering, Doorstead

Doorstead is a technology operations startup that provides full-service property management for homeowners.  They offer guaranteed monthly rent to owners, even before a tenant is finalized and regardless of vacancy.

We spoke with Doorstead’s Head of Engineering, Willy Wu, to learn how Prodvana enabled Doorstead to accelerate past rudimentary CI/CD toolchains to a sophisticated orchestration platform. Willy’s team builds and operates all of the software that powers Doorstead, including growth, pricing, payments, and machine learning tools. He shares how Prodvana helped Doorstead set up a flexible, future-ready production platform.

Challenge: Addressing Black-Box Platform and Knowledge Gaps

Doorstead initially chose Elastic Beanstalk because of its simplicity since the platform created by AWS abstracted away the complexity of running production services. But as the company grew to over 30 Elastic Beanstalk environments across multiple services and release channels, that simplicity turned into a maintenance burden.

Opaque Platform: Low Knowledge Sharing

Willy and the team needed a simpler way for engineers to debug production issues, but they only had a single engineer that had built up the expertise to understand the layers of complexity within Elastic Beanstalk to debug failures.

"The under-the-hood intricacies of Elastic Beanstalk led to a bottleneck, with only one team member grasping its nuances. Expanding this knowledge was a low return on investment across the organization."

Resource Constraints: Small Team Dynamics

Given limited resources and time, Doorstead needed a reliable way for engineers to create new services and deploy code without knowing the details of how the underlying systems ran.

"Our small team couldn't dedicate excessive resources to managing infrastructure. We needed a solution to streamline operations without compromising scalability. Prodvana's developer-friendly experience and extensible platform were key factors that drove Doorstead's decision to adopt it." 

Solution: Streamlining Platform Orchestration

For a streamlined deployment process with guaranteed reliability, Doorstead embraced the Prodvana orchestration platform. The platform automated environment requirements, such as database migrations and offering transparent crash logs within the UI.

Abstraction and Simplification: Democratizing Deployments

Given the need to have engineers ship code quickly and deliver features for their users, Willy needed a platform that streamlined deployments and made them easy regardless of specific knowledge.

"With Prodvana, any engineer at Doorstead can stand up a new service across multiple release channels in just minutes." 

Reliability and Automation: Enhancing Efficiency

Over a six-month period, Doorstead achieved an impressive ~99% successful deployment rate across 1,800+ deployments. This marked a stark increase in velocity and reliability compared to their experience with Elastic Beanstalk. 

"Our deployments are now more reliable and efficient, thanks to Prodvana's automated handling of environment requirements, including critical database migrations."

Result: Empowering Efficiency, Standardization, and Agility

Prodvana's adoption brought about a transformative operational shift for Doorstead. Their deployment pace surged, underscored by an upswing in successful daily deployments. Democratizing deployment aligned with Head of Engineering, Willy Wu's vision, removing the single-person dependency.

Accelerated Deployment Velocity: Achieving Metrics-Backed Results

With Prodvana, Doorstead saw a marked increase in their per-engineer deployment rates, enabling full continuous deployment and enhancing their ability to deliver updates swiftly.

"Our deployment metrics reflect remarkable improvement since Prodvana's integration, illustrating heightened speed and efficiency for our engineer teams." 

Future-Ready Production Systems: Increasing Flexibility of Platforms

By migrating to Prodvana, Doorstead can position itself for the next phase of its engineering and company journey, built on a scalable, efficient, and adaptable production environment. 

“With Prodvana's empowerment, Doorstead not only surmounted operational challenges but also ensured a future-proof infrastructure built on Kubernetes, leaving the complexities of the old Elastic Beanstalk setup behind.”