“Prodvana’s partnership and intent-based deployment product make us confident in our ability to launch and manage multiple regions as well as understand where code is deployed.” - Matt Iselin

Replit is a platform serving 22+ million developers with a mission of empowering the next billion software creators. Replit offers AI-assisted cloud-native software development, enabling developers to spin up development environments and launch complete applications in seconds.

We spoke with Matt Iselin, Head of SRE at Replit, to learn more about how easy it was to migrate onto Prodvana and accelerate intelligent delivery for their developers.

Challenge: Addressing Downtime and Operational Overhead

A latent bug in Replit’s code base, introduced in 2021, led to an extended downtime. Despite a swift response, the recovery was hindered by difficulties in the rollback process and a lack of available capacity. 

This incident, a growing number of regions, and the operational overhead of managing multiple tools like Spinnaker, ArgoCD, and Terraform highlighted the critical need for a more robust and reliable deployment platform. It became imperative to standardize workflows to prevent similar disruptions in the future.

“There was a critical need to address our platform needs holistically so that we could maximize time spent building and shipping to our users.”

Solution: Unifying Replit’s deployments into a single intent-based platform

Deploying Globally

Much of Replit’s operational overhead was due to managing services * regions. This was reduced through Prodvana’s Managed Delivery feature, which enables standards to be set once for existing and new environments.

“Managed Delivery cut down the time to launch and maintain regions. Now we can manage our regions in a single place with minimal configuration.”

A unified platform and developer-friendly UI & UX

Prodvana’s Runtime and Runtime Extensions enabled Replit to deploy any workload, including Terraform, Virtual Machines, and Kubernetes, while at the same time providing a UX tailored by persona.

“Prodvana was able to handle our diverse workloads as well as a platform that surfaces the right information to the right person at the right time.”

Top-notch Engineering Partnership and Service

The Replit team values velocity and needs a partner to serve and adapt to their needs. They found Prodvana’s experienced engineering team and founders to be a great match.

“Prodvana's team has been a true partner. They were responsive and collaborative, able to meet our needs and evolve their platform.”

Migration in weeks, not months or quarters

Prodvana's brownfield first design played a pivotal role in minimizing the migration time of dozens of Kubernetes clusters and sophisticated virtual machine infrastructure. In six weeks Replit migrated 100% of its globally distributed and diverse workloads to Prodvana and shut down Spinnaker and ArgoCD. 

“We were amazed at how easy it was to migrate onto Prodvana. Pure Kubernetes workloads were migrated in just two weeks, and the team was able to work with us to build Runtime Extensions to handle Terraform and VMs.” - Matt Iselin

Result: Empowering Efficiency, Standardization, and Agility

By utilizing Prodvana, Replit is well-positioned to maintain an efficient platform team even as its product and infrastructure footprint grows.

Future-Proofing Deployments and Optimizing Dependency Management

With the confidence to build on Prodvana’s self-healing capabilities, Replit looks towards optimizing its development and deployment processes in dependency management between workloads such as Terraform and Replit services.

"We were searching for an intent-based CD system to optimize and future-proof our processes and systems so rollbacks to well-known states are fast, reliable, and robust against operator errors. We found that in Prodvana."

Conclusion

The close partnership between Replit and Prodvana’s engineering teams enabled Replit to migrate all its services in six weeks. Replit’s SRE and Platform team are a force multiplier, making engineering more agile than ever.

“The partnership with Prodvana has been best in class. The Prodvana has been in lock-step with us and continues to be. Clearly, the team is very experienced and understands what engineers working at scale need.”

To learn more about Prodvana’s Intelligent Deployment Platform and how easy migration are, contact us here.