Supporting scalability: DoiT helps Folloze achieve cost-effective growth with a full AWS migration
Meet Folloze
In marketing, remaining competitive and making personalized, targeted offers are two increasingly challenging areas for marketers. That’s why Folloze created the world’s first and only no-code B2B Buyer Experience Platform, which enables marketers to quickly build digital experiences with no tech background or coding skills.
When a business uses Folloze, the digital experiences that the business generates live within its own domain — securely, on-brand, and without requiring effort from developers. Instead of using their own IT teams to build a digital experience that can take weeks or months, marketers can make their own in just a few hours with Folloze, saving time, costs, and labor. In addition, Folloze has a data layer that provides customers with deep insights into the behaviour and intent of their buyer.
“We complete the picture of the buyer experience. Our personalization engine powers the digital experience, enabling every buyer to get a unique experience depending on their location, industry, and position. This is more or less like bringing the B2C experience into the B2B world,” says Itamar Golan, VP of Research and Development, Folloze.
But delivering this experience for customers got more challenging. As Folloze’s business grew, so did the demands on its complex infrastructure.
The Challenge
At first, Folloze didn’t need an in-house DevOps engineer—its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider at the time managed all of its servers and maintenance. As Folloze’s customer base grew and requirements became more demanding, the underlying infrastructure grew more complex, introduced more sophisticated software, and required deeper automation.
Folloze needed an infrastructure platform that could support growth, without inflating costs. In order for Folloze to go to this next level of scale, it needed more control, so the company’s leadership team decided to fully migrate to AWS for its public cloud infrastructure.
The Solution
Migrating to AWS
DoiT’s Cloud Reliability Engineers reviewed Folloze’s cloud architecture and collaborated with Folloze’s implementation partner to scale it. Their partner also supported the hands-on implementation.
“When we choose partners like DoiT, we’re looking for the right people to do business with, because these are the people we’ll be working with. Connection is a really important foundation for our partnership,” says Golan.
Folloze’s migration was delivered in two phases: first, moving the primary application onto AWS. Next, the team migrated Redis, ETL, and QA environments to AWS. With DoiT’s expertise, the cutover incurred only about two hours of downtime.
Professional funding process
As an AWS Premier Tier Partner, DoiT helped secure AWS funding for the migration, dramatically reducing Folloze’s expenses. After phase one, Folloze adopted DoiT’s automated cost-optimization to continuously optimize workload costs.
With DoiT, Folloze automatically selects optimal compute configurations and scales them to demand, resulting in a simplified infrastructure, better performance, and a more stable customer experience.
Decreased downtime
One important benefit shows up in Folloze’s Kubernetes (K8s) workflows on its new AWS infrastructure. Some of these K8s workflows run on infrastructure that runs 24 hours a day and is billed every hour. Other workflows run on something called Spot Instances, which leverages extra AWS capacity that companies can bid on to use at a lower price, but which can cause downtime if a competing company bids more. With DoiT, Folloze avoids these limitations by using dedicated machines for critical workflows—while still receiving discounted pricing.
The Results
Working together to get the best results
“I think the main value that Folloze received by working with DoiT is from the commercial side. The funding process was super fast and professional. And from a technical perspective, DoiT helped with cloud cost monitoring and anomaly detection,” says Golan.
DoiT’s support from day one ensured a swift, seamless migration, with the Folloze team working closely with DoiT’s Cloud Reliability Engineers. Other benefits, like stronger security, help Folloze enforce best practices across the business, such as requiring VPNs for internal resources.
Better, faster, stronger
Since migrating its environment to AWS and improving its provisioning process, Folloze has seen a 25% to 30% increase in performance. And once it moves Redis into the virtual private cloud (VPC), where all production workloads run, it will improve load time on all the sites by 25%.
“I’ve worked on many integrations – sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s not, but there is always something missing,” says the partner DevOps Consultant. “But DoiT’s technology provides great out-of-the-box functionality, like integrated Slack messages and a dashboard that consolidates many different resources, alerts, and metrics. I can see all the accounts for all the different services and savings in one place. It’s very comfortable to use.”
Cutting costs with cloud cost monitoring
Although AWS costs can be higher early in a migration, over time right-sizing and regional expansion lower overall costs, and high-usage discounts further reduce spend. It also offers discounts for high usage.
What's Next?
As Folloze moves into a new phase of its migration and expands to new markets, it has a strong partner in DoiT to scale AWS securely and cost-effectively—empowering its customers to do more in B2B marketing.
“As a company, we have high growth in terms of customers, which means we need to serve more and more traffic to serve our customers well. Before, we were limited,” says Golan. “But now the limits are practically removed. If our needs grow, we have more people and professional guidance to help us. We’re in a good place for our future scale.”