Jet.com - E-commerce challenger eyes the top spot, runs on the Microsoft cloud
Marc Lore is perhaps best known as the creator of the popular e-commerce site Diapers.com, which was eventually sold to Amazon. Now, the entrepreneur and his team are ready to compete head-on with the e-retailing giant through an innovative online marketplace called Jet.com. To get up and running quickly, Jet built its entire e-commerce platform, including development and delivery infrastructure, on Microsoft Azure, using both .NET and open-source technologies.
Business Challenge
In 2010, Marc Lore sold his company Quidsi (which ran e-retailing sites like Diapers.com and Soap.com) to Amazon for $550 million. Four years later, Marc is competing against Amazon directly—with the creation of a new online marketplace called Jet.com.
There are many reasons to think that Lore might just pull it off. For one, he plans to eliminate any margins from product sales. The company’s only source of revenue will come from membership dues, eliminating the kind of mark-ups that Amazon charges and passing the savings on to the customer. In addition, an innovative pricing engine will work to reduce or eliminate costs in the e-commerce value chain, especially fulfillment costs and marketplace commissions.
“Our pricing engine will continually work out the most cost-effective way to fulfill an order from merchant locations closest to the consumer,’ explains Lore, Co-Founder and CEO of Jet. “The engine will also figure out which merchants can fulfill most cheaply by putting multiple requested items into one shipment. And so we can cut probably 10 percent of a cost of a typical e-commerce transaction just by being smarter about fulfillment.”
With a value proposition like that, the company is confidently looking forward to explosive growth. “We want to be one of the leading e-commerce destinations in a very short period of time—18 to 36 months,” says Mike Hanrahan, CTO at Jet.
To fuel that growth, Jet was able to quickly secure more than $220 million in financing. Meanwhile, aggressive marketing has already created a user base of more than 400,000 customers—even before the site launched.
Next step: find the right cloud partner to support the company’s ambitious growth plan. “We realized that we simply did not have the resources to build and manage the kind of datacenters and development infrastructure to meet our growth strategy,” says Hanrahan. “So we quickly decided on a cloud model.”
Solution
The decision to work with Microsoft Azure was driven, in part, by the .NET development platform—and Visual F# in particular—which was a good fit with the microservices architecture used to build Jet. As Hanrahan explains, “The event-driven, microservices paradigm eliminated a lot of the overhead that comes with a service-oriented architecture such as Amazon uses, meaning that everyone can build all their systems in parallel and then publish and subscribe to an event bus. We found that F# works very well with this paradigm, especially the immutable data streams that are a key part of our microservices architecture.”
The Microsoft Visual Studio development system is the primary IDE for back-end infrastructure, with Node being used on the front end. To get its code through development and into production as fast as possible, Jet uses a mix of Azure App Service, Azure Web Roles and custom servers, with deployment happening from Jenkins.
Jet also has many open-source middleware components, which it runs on Azure Virtual Machines, including Elasticsearch, RedisLabs, Hadoop, and Event Store—an open-source event-sourcing data store.
Jet is taking advantage of several other Azure services to streamline its development processes. For example, to make it easier for merchant partners to integrate with the platform, it has created a developer portal for its APIs using Azure API Management.
Jet is also using Azure Key Vault to store encryption keys as well as Azure Application Insights, which will provide real-time alerts to its developers to help them identify and triage problems as they occur. Application Insights also enables Jet to learn, in real time, how customers are using their application, so they can implement an agile build-measure-learn cycle.
“Being able to leverage so many off-the-shelf services and tools from Azure enabled us to go from zero to a full- fledged e-commerce marketplace in just about 12 months. That same system would have taken us at least two years to build on our own, plus capex costs,” says Hanrahan.
The company also relies on other Microsoft cloud services to run its day-to-day business, including Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. In fact, Jet’s entire operation is now run in the cloud using Azure. “We have no servers at all onsite right now, not a single one,” says Hanrahan.
Benefits
Working with Microsoft Azure cloud services has provided Jet with a level of flexibility and scalability that has been critical to its aggressive development schedule.
Moving from code to production in minutes.
By using App Service for its consumer front end, Jet has been able to dramatically streamline its development process, so that it can build, deploy, and scale consumer-grade web apps more rapidly. As Hanrahan says, “We’ve been able to get our critical code through our CI/CD process in a couple of minutes using App Service.”
Scaling automatically to meet customer demand
As with any popular e-retailing site, Jet requires extremely rapid and flexible scaling based on ever-changing customer traffic. To streamline this process, Jet was able to set up auto-scaling on both PaaS servers and App Service to scale its servers based on load or schedule. “Because both PaaS and App Service scale automatically for us, we are able to throw as many machines as we need at the front end, when we need them,” says Hanrahan.
As the company grows, Azure provides a wide range of storage options to handle virtually any amount of data. “Right now our data warehouse sits in a SQL Server instance, but we will be augmenting that using HD Insight,” says Hanrahan. Azure HDInsight is designed to handle any amount of data, scaling from terabytes to petabytes on demand.
With Azure, Jet has created a cloud infrastructure that’s ready to meet the company’s most ambitious growth plans. “To be one of the best e-commerce destinations in the US, we will have to handle millions of customers, placing tens of thousands of orders a day. That requires a top-class e-commerce system built on a flexible, open cloud platform. That is exactly what we got with Azure,” says Hanrahan.
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Talis Clinical
Healthcare Technology Firm Launches New Perioperative Solution on Microsoft Azure
Talis Clinical wanted to make an innovative anesthesia information management system more widely available, so it redesigned the application to run in the cloud on Microsoft Azure. Called ACG-Anesthesia, the patient-centric solution provides centralized, automated visibility into patient risk factors and changing physiologic conditions from the decision to perform surgery through recovery.
In addition, built-in advanced clinical guidance and evidence-based care protocols empower physicians to more effectively manage all phases of perioperative care.
Making healthcare smarter
Sharing data quickly and accurately across multiple processes is important for all businesses, but nowhere is it more critical than in a hospital setting where the right information at the right time can mean the difference between life and death. Among the most critical events in patient care is the intraoperative episode, where the anesthesia care team must simultaneously monitor and react to multiple physiological parameters.
To address those challenges, an application was developed and implemented at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic that integrates data from patient monitors, medical devices, and electronic health records (EHR) to provide centralized insight and multiparameter decision support. The anesthesia system was already being used in more than 270 operating rooms when the development team and an experienced medical entrepreneur decided to establish a new firm called Talis Clinical and offer the solution to other healthcare organizations.
Talis immediately began expanding the scope of the anesthesia system to include preoperative and postoperative events. In addition to improving patient care and safety, the extended solution would help healthcare providers get more value from the electronic health records (EHR) systems that many organizations had installed and augmented to satisfy recent regulations. Gary Colister, Chief Executive Officer of Talis, explains, “EHR technology alone does not provide the level of vigilance needed in perioperative care; it mostly enables the clinical team to record what happens.”
Moving to the cloud
Talis spent a year looking at an array of cloud platforms from specialized medical platforms to large commercial vendors. The new company decided that Microsoft Azure was the best choice for commercializing its application. “We went through all of these evaluations, and then we actually realized that we’re a Microsoft shop, with all of our technology built on a Microsoft platform,” says Colister. “We’re also moving very fast, and we needed to make sure that not only the individual pieces of software we deployed had the necessary robustness, but that our cloud partner had a deep awareness of our technology stack. It really came down to that support.”
Using the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, including Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Talis redesigned its anesthesiology solution to run in the cloud on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. The highly scalable, flexible environment provides a range of benefits, including easy integration with virtually any endpoint including diverse EHRs and medical devices. On the back end, Talis gained similar advantages, including support for its databases, which ran on Linux operating systems.
The solution, called ACG-Anesthesia, continuously collects patient data such as heart rate and blood pressure, and provides real-time, clinical views of specific patient conditions in multiple rooms. It also includes electronic case summaries and hand-off checklists so that comprehensive information can be shared efficiently with all members of a medical team. ACG-Anesthesia automatically pulls data from Talis clinical products, medical devices, EHRs, lab systems, pharmacies, and more.
In the operating room, the anesthesia care team uses an intuitive touchscreen to access and record information. Elsewhere, the supervising physician can use a mobile device to remotely monitor multiple rooms staffed by nurses or other members of the care team. In addition to providing a way to monitor patient health through a central interface, the solution pushes real-time alerts to devices including tablets and smartphones. It can be customized for a wide range of scenarios, including general, cardiac, and pediatric care.
Built-in clinical guidance supports complex decisions by calculating multiple parameters and events. As a result, the solution can alert caregivers to potential adverse conditions and reactions. And besides providing operational and clinical guidance at the point of care, ACG-Anesthesia helps hospitals collect and report data required by healthcare reform acts and other regulations.
Talis is also migrating other clinical products to the cloud, including a portal that establishes and measures protocols for preoperative testing and image-based, documentation technology that is used for assessment before anesthesia is administered. Both products are already integrated with ACG-Anesthesia. Brought to market in just two years, the suite is available across North America.
Improving healthcare
By taking advantage of Microsoft Azure, Talis Clinical can help medical organizations throughout North America improve patient care and safety at all stages of treatment and recovery.
Provides better support for innovation
With the Microsoft cloud, Talis was able to launch an innovative product that can help hospitals improve performance. “We have determined that Microsoft Azure can help us serve clients better than other traditional platforms,” says Colister. “We want our clients to feel like we can deliver the highest level of service that they expect. To be able to provide insights that help clinicians be more vigilant and at the same time produce legal documentation for compliance—that’s a big achievement in our space.”
Improves patient outcome
By providing timely, relevant data through remote apps and devices, Talis can help clinicians improve patient care. “The perioperative surgical care model is being studied at a lot of prominent medical centers around the country, and it emphasizes continuity and measuring patient information from the preop to surgery, subsequent physical therapy, and beyond discharge” says Karen Alexander, Vice President of Business Intelligence at Talis Clinical. “With Microsoft Azure, we can build the technology to implement this new care model and improve patient outcomes.”
Increases clinical efficiency
Talis is also improving workflow for hospital staff, which frees up valuable time where it matters most. “We’re talking to clinicians who tell us that our product saves them an hour each day in documentation, and it also reduces downtime because it’s more accurate,” Colister says. “With Microsoft technology, we’re creating solutions that make physicians more productive so that they can take better care of patients.”
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Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management enrolls approximately 2,000 students, many of whom work full time. Connecting and engaging busy students can be challenging, so the business school took a page from Fortune 500 companies: it uses Yammer to foster collaboration, enhance learning, and forge tighter relationships among students, faculty, staff, and increasingly, alumni.
The Yammer Solution
In 2010, the school integrated Yammer into Graziadio’s Learning Environment and Network (GLEAN). Since then, Yammer has been virally adopted by most business school students, faculty, and staff.
“We knew students wanted broader engagement, but we did not anticipate how much they’d help each other with logistical questions, IT support, business contacts, professional advice, and moral support,” says Director of eLearning Susan Gautsch. “We also didn’t anticipate the social power of Yammer, which psychologically bridges online and face-to-face experiences. It creates a strong sense of community, regardless of students’ schedules or where they’re studying.”
Students from Graziadio’s Master of Science in Organizational Development program, who come from six countries and only meet five times over two years, stay engaged using Yammer: one class of 35 students has collectively posted 6,000 messages over an eight-month period.
One popular Yammer implementation is what the business school calls Peer Connection. “It’s student driven,” Gautsch explains. “They use it to get to know each other and set up affinity groups.” For instance, students join the Marketing group to network and swap ideas about industry news and course topics.
The school’s faculty also put Yammer to good use. Many have set up private Yammer groups to facilitate and deepen class discussions. Another popular program is Classrooms Across Borders, a way for faculty to share their expertise. Students can follow topics or professors, who post open questions or share articles to generate online discussion. “It’s a great way for faculty to have more of a presence, to get what they do out there to the wider student body,” Gautsch observes.
Yammer is also popular with staff. Academic advisors use it to communicate broadly, answering questions and sending out updates on everything from upcoming meetings to traffic snarls that may make it hard to get to campus. “Our deans are getting online more and more to engage with students and alumni, which they appreciate,” Gautsch observes. She adds that, “Alumni are a growing part of our network, since students who use Yammer want to keep using it to stay engaged with the university after they graduate.”
THE RESULTS
An end to communication silos. Yammer allows faculty, staff, and students to communicate across departments and campuses.
Deeper connections. Professors and staff use Yammer to expand on classroom discussions and tighten ties with students and each other.
New networking opportunities. Full- and part-time students make cross-program connections and network with alumni through topic-driven conversations.
An ever-growing data repository. Due to its search functionality and ease of contributing content, Yammer is a valuable living knowledge base.
ABOUT YAMMER
Yammer (https://about.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network (ESN) used by more than 500,000 organizations worldwide —including approximately 85 percent of the Fortune 500 —to connect and communicate. Yammer brings together employees, content, conversations, and business data in a single location. Founded in 2008, Yammer was acquired by Microsoft and is available with Office 365, to deliver a comprehensive, seamless social experience across the applications people already use.
Next Games, is a fast growing gaming company based in Helsinki, Finland. On October 7, 2015, AMC and Next Games released The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, the official mobile game based on AMC’s record-breaking TV series, for iOS. Within a week, the game quickly skyrocketed to the #1 spot on Apple’s Top Free App chart.
To handle the massive scale and performance requirements for their highly anticipated game (over 1,000,000 downloads and 31M minutes played on opening weekend alone), the Next Games development team chose to implement their backend services on Azure. For their persistence layer, which needed to ingest massive volumes of game profile and state metadata while serving low latency queries (under 10 ms), they selected Azure DocumentDB, the fully managed NoSQL JSON database.
The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is a turn-based mobile strategy game that supports single player and multiplayer campaigns. In the game, you build bases, find more survivors, upgrade your skills and weapons and carry out successful missions, much like in the popular TV show. You play with an online connection; player and guild metadata must be persisted and retrieved frequently during gameplay.
Why Azure DocumentDB?
A key requirement for the Next Games development team was a database that could respond seamlessly to the massive scale and performance demands of this hotly anticipated game.
With millions of users expected to be online on day one, the database had to handle numerous real time player metadata updates as players logged in and logged out, AND elastically scale performance up or down as required.
Responsiveness was critical to user experience. Saving player profiles and score information had to complete within milliseconds to avoid any lags during game play.
In addition to simple key-value lookups, the data tier needed to filter against different properties in real-time, e.g. locate players by their internal player IDs, or their GameCenter, Facebook, Google IDs, or query based on player membership in a guild.
The game includes social features including in-game chat messages, player guild memberships, challenges completed, and a social graph, which required a flexible schema. Next Games also need to perform ordering against various groupings of players (ex. by country, or social network) to build real-time “high score” leaderboards.
Time to market was critical for Next Games, and the team made a conscious decision to develop only with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. It was important that the database required minimal setup and management work to allow for rapid iteration.
After evaluating various solutions, Next Games chose Azure DocumentDB as a core component of the game since it met and exceeded all these requirements.
How they used DocumentDB
Next Games created DocumentDB accounts for their development, load testing and production environments to store player metadata and social grouping data. For partitioning data within these accounts, the Next Games team used the DocumentDB .NET SDK and the hash partition resolver to distribute data among DocumentDB collections using consistent hashing. DocumentDB collections were configured with the S3 performance level for the highest throughput and best performance, setup with string range indexing policy for efficient and flexible sorting.
The Next Games team implemented a repository class that performed writes using atomic upserts, and reads using one of the following three query patterns:
Single partition queries based on a single player ID
Multi-partition queries with a fixed page size/maximum item count that scanned DocumentDB partitions in series (to list the top N groups or friends for a player)
Multi-partition queries that scanned partitions in parallel for lowest latency using ResolveForRead, e.g. locating players through a “secondary index” e.g., their Facebook ID, Google ID, or GameCenter ID
Another key feature in the game was displaying the highest scores in real-time. This included global high scores, high scores by a gamer’s country, and among their group of friends. This was implemented as a service which performed intra-collection sorting using DocumentDB query, and subsequently aggregated results as separate “high score” documents also stored as JSON documents within separate collections.
Business is better with Office 365
Moving to the cloud enables organizations to work more efficiently.
Office 365 has given M3 Marine 100% reliable productivity since moving to the cloud.
Tastea operates with 2x the productivity.
Breathe Hot Yoga has experienced 3x growth in less than three years.
Martin Aircraft relies on Office 365 for everything it needs to take on the global market.
With Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite, Godiva has access to information when and where they need it, enabling them to deliver the ultimate chocolate experience for every single one of their customers.
About GODIVA:
Since 1926 GODIVA has been the premier maker of the fine Belgian chocolate. Learn more.
Building a bank that can surprise and delight with Power BI
When Metro Bank opened in London in 2010, it was a brash competitor in a seriously traditional industry. The vision? To redefine the relationship people have with their bank by innovating customer service. With such offerings as seven-day-a-week store hours and lightning-quick service — a customer can open an account and get a debit card within minutes — the bank built a foundation for fast growth, doubling in size year after year and soaring to more than 500,000 customer accounts.
But with that growth has come a need for deeper and more detailed information about what customers want and need — how they interact with the bank’s services, including stores, online, telephony and mobile. Metro Bank needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that could quickly and accurately provide information to guide analysis and decision-making. Microsoft Power BI gave Metro Bank what it was looking for, with interest.
A focus on customers
“We set out to create fans, not customers,” says Bruce Rioch, head of Business Information and Customer Systems at Metro Bank. “We want to surprise and delight. We want to be the bank that our customers tell their family and friends about — the bank that offers amazing customer service and has a simple, understandable proposition.”
To provide an innovative, personalized service, Metro Bank needs to capture rich detail about its customers, from how long it takes to resolve their questions via telephone call centers, to identifying peak times for transactions conducted via the bank’s mobile app. And those details need to be clear and easy to understand, and available to the right person at the right time.
“As we’ve grown, more and more people have been asking questions about how effective or efficient the service is, and how well we are providing services,” Rioch says. “We struggled along during the first few years; we had what we needed. But as we've grown bigger, the question has become ‘how on earth do we provide the right information to the right people at the right time?’”
A system that looks familiar
Metro Bank decided to implement Microsoft Power BI because the solution integrated easily with the bank’s existing Microsoft stack, and was easy for colleagues to quickly learn and personalize for their daily needs.
“Power BI is our only BI solution,” Rioch says. “We had a solution previously that was fine for us as a brand-new startup organization. But as we grew, we needed something more dynamic, more visually appealing and more user-friendly for our colleagues. Power BI fits the bill in all of those respects.”
Metro Bank uses Power BI to track customer interactions, internal metrics and more:
•Call center operations. Power BI enables Metro Bank to track call volume, service levels, customer demographics, call times and shift scheduling. Reporting data is refreshed each night so colleagues have a clear picture of the previous day, weeks, months or year.
•Mobile and Internet banking. Colleagues can analyze data including the volume and types of transactions customers are performing online, the devices they use, and peak activity times throughout the day. “We get a real sense of how the channels are growing, and how they're being used by our customers, and what services they use once they're inside that service,” Rioch says. “Which is quite important because it helps us direct what we build next.”
•Customer dissatisfaction reports. Metro Bank can track customer complaints, including the rate of open complaints per 1,000 accounts, the time it takes to resolve them and the departments involved. One key feature is the ability to flag the most urgent complaints so that colleagues can take steps to resolve them before the deadline for reporting an outstanding issue to regulatory bodies.
•Staffing and workload planning. Power BI collects data on peak activity times in bank branches, types of transactions and other customer activity details, enabling Metro Bank to plan staffing to meet customer demands — for example, identifying the busiest hour of the busiest day of the month per branch — and help ensure quick, efficient service.
Rich detail, easy to visualize
By collecting rich detail and making it easy to analyze through personalized dashboards, Power BI helps bank colleagues identify problems before they can affect the bank’s relationship with the customer. Colleagues can combine details from account activity, data from customer satisfaction surveys, branch traffic patterns and more to understand which proactive solutions can make the biggest difference to the customer experience. Similar survey data offers insight into the employee experience, or what Rioch calls “the voice of the colleague.”
“The internal survey is built out of the dashboard,” Rioch says. “In the past it would have been all spreadsheet-driven; this year we've been able to display the colleague results really visually — and fantastically."
As a participant in the Power BI Preview, Metro Bank is also working with Microsoft developers to preview and test new features and offer feedback on functionality. The bank’s input helps shape the future of Power BI. And the dynamic program provides frequent updates, helping Metro Bank continually improve its customer service and offerings built on new capabilities.
“We use Power BI for everything,” Rioch says. “We love this product.”
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"With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds." Richard Crowley Director of Operations
AWS Case Study: Slack
About Slack
Slack provides a messaging platform that integrates with and unifies a wide range of communications services such as Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Jira, GitHub, MailChimp, Trello, and Stripe. The San Francisco–based company, which launched its eponymous app in February 2014, was started by a small group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that include Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield. Privately-held Slack is on Fortune Magazine’s “Unicorn List” of startup firms worth $1 billion or more, with a $2.8 billion valuation supported by a five percent weekly user growth rate and major brand-name customers including Adobe, Samsung, Intuit, NASA, Dow Jones, eBay, and Expedia.
The Challenge
In the age of the unicorn startups, Slack has drawn attention for its meteoric rise and potential for disrupting traditional business communications tools, particularly email. By June 2015—less than 18 months after its launch—the company already had more than 1.1 million daily users, 300,000 paid seats, and more than 30 million messages flowing through Slack each week via integrations with other services.
Slack’s founders had already learned hard lessons from previous failed ventures. One of those was the importance of picking the right IT infrastructure to run the business. If Slack was to succeed in a fiercely competitive business-software marketplace, its founders knew they would need a lean staff, low costs, and above all an IT environment capable of supporting speed, agility, and innovation. Going to the cloud was the logical choice.
“The realities of physical space, hardware acquisition, replacement parts, running a server facility with all its costs—all the physical manifestations that can lead to breakages—made a traditional IT environment impractical for an Internet startup,” says Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations. “Plus we would have needed an extra layer of expertise just to run the infrastructure. We could have operated with that kind of IT infrastructure, but the cost and complexity would have made it much harder to launch the business.”
Why Amazon Web Services
Crowley says Slack turned to Amazon Web Services out of experience and because it was the best choice for the company going forward. Tiny Speck—the original company name for what became Slack Technologies—used AWS in 2009 when it was the only viable offering for public cloud services.
“Given their expertise and pains running a more traditional environment when Flickr was developed, Slack’s founders realized it was a no brainer to use AWS,” says Crowley. “During the development of Slack, the feeling was that AWS was good to us and would continually improve with more and better features. There was no need to leave.”
Slack has a relatively simple IT architecture that is based on a broad range of AWS services, including i2.xlarge Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for basic compute tasks; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for users’ file uploads and static assets; and Elastic Load Balancing to balance workloads across Amazon EC2 instances.
For security, Slack uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to control security groups and firewall rules and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control user credentials and roles. The company uses Amazon CloudTrail for monitoring logs related to Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon Route 53 for DNS management.
Along with the AWS services, Slack is using the Redis data structure server, the Apache Solr search tool, the Squid caching proxy, and a MySQL database.
The Benefits
Using AWS as its IT infrastructure has helped Slack achieve an astonishing growth rate and a multibillion-dollar valuation with a platform that supports speed of innovation and responsiveness, reliability, and security features to ensure the confidentiality of customer information.
Crowley says AWS gives fast-growing companies like Slack the ability to minimize their involvement with daily IT management. That lets them focus on pushing innovative products and services to market quickly. “We have a lot of metrics and programs that tell us about available capacity for new customer teams to join and existing customers to grow their Slack usage,” he says. “With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds.”
The ease of provisioning resources in the AWS cloud allows Slack to practice disaster recovery scenarios, which is essential for assuring existing and prospective customers that their information will always be there, when and where they need it. “One of the real strengths of AWS is that we can do a lot of re-provisioning of our infrastructure, making sure that we can recover quickly and competently in the event that something goes down,” Crowley says. “Having the ability to quickly grab twice as many of a certain class of instances is great. It gives us the ability to regularly practice our disaster recovery scenarios.”
A large part of the appeal of Slack is that it replaces disparate communications tools with a single, unified platform. But that puts an increased burden on Slack to ensure that its customers' information is safe, and that Slack can deliver the kind of enterprise reliability and high availability to support the service-level agreements expected of robust enterprise applications.
“As a company, our business is integral to our customers’ daily lives,” Crowley says. “So in our customers’ eyes, our security controls and ability to deliver a reliable service become incredibly important, and it’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously.”
He says AWS immediately addresses customers’ security concerns because AWS publishes service organization control (SOC) reports, which are based on third-party examinations evaluating how AWS achieves compliance controls and objectives. “The fact that we can rely on the AWS security posture to boost our own security is really important for our business. AWS does a much better job at security than we could ever do running a cage in a data center,” Crowley says. ”Hosting Slack in AWS makes our customers more confident that Slack is safe, secure, and always on.”
