Testimonial Archives | Clever Cloud

Damien Cavaillès, Founder of WeLoveDevs.com

Julie Nolot — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 12:29:57 +0000

We went to meet Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com, to talk about the strategic and technical challenges of his solution. Our approach is to better understand the specificities of our clients' businesses and how our solutions fit into their activities.

A growing solution for devs

Developers and recruiters who use WeLoveDevs.com appreciate above all being in the best conditions to meet. Each party feels valued, listened to and considered. And this leads to a number of specific features in the software product. For example, the solution is deployed several times a day, so that it can evolve with the use of the developers.

Today, WeLoveDevs is a recognised media and job site, visited by more than 90K techs who think about their careers every month. Their main challenge today is to offer them even more job offers by meeting and registering new companies one by one.

Data hosting in France and performance

To meet the needs of their clients, WeLoveDevs needs to have servers in France, and good performance, and they were not satisfied with the containerized PaaS offers, proposed by Heroku for example.

Being in France is crucial because we keep the personal data of many developers who are very demanding and they deserve it. And for performance, it's also important for SEO.
Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

0% admin sys, 100% agility

Not wanting to be burdened with system administration, Damien has always used PaaS services. In the same logic, WeLoveDevs has therefore mainly adopted SaaS or serverless tools.

"We don't want to get up at night to do SSH and connect to a machine.
If it works on your machine, it works a few minutes later on the PaaS."
Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

His challenge is to keep a small tech team, as agile as possible. The objective: to be able to put a feature into production within a day, after talking to a client, and therefore to keep this proximity with their clients. As a result, a solution that allows them to do without backend devs or ops suits them very well.

Why did you choose Clever Cloud?

Damien: "CleverCloud is the only player that meets our performance requirements and allows us to deploy continuously via Git. Also we didn't need to make any special efforts to adopt the platform, our NPM build was working from day one. I think we come for the deployment, but we stay for the quality of the customer service. It is technically competent, human and accessible."

"At Clever we know better what we're going to have as a machine in front of us and we're on bare-metal: an application that is on Heroku, will necessarily go twice as fast on Clever."
Damien Cavaillès, founder of WeLoveDevs.com

How did the migration go?

Damien: "GIT PUSH… That's it! We stacked things up one by one afterwards. The biggest change was adding Cloudflare and it really changed the performance of our Node server and our Wordpress."

Why use Clever Cloud?

Damien: "If you are already on another PaaS, your application will surely be faster by migrating it to Clever. And if you already have a build/deployment that is continuous and automated, you will have no effort to migrate. It costs nothing to try!"

If you too would like to test our solutions, create your Clever Cloud account or log in with your Github account here and get 20€ of free credits.

Customer Testimonial – Guillaume Chollier from Utocat

Clément Nivolle — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 16:54:00 +0000

Blockchain technology is a much discussed subject these days, but when you ask someone what it allows them to do regardless of the interaction they have with crypto-currencies, the answer is rather vague. Guillaume Chollier - Utocat CTO has agreed to talk with me about this technology, the perspective and how the Utocat team is using Clever Cloud. Let’s take a look at the world of the Blockchain, with the help of those who are using it on a daily basis.

Hey, Economy, do you know Blockchain?

To briefly introduce Utocat, Guillaume Chollier has a simple answer: “We are a Blockchain software editor for the financial sector”. It’s been 4 years that we exist and use Blockchain technology. We have therefore witnessed the emergence of many solutions using it in recent years. Most of them are focused on the use of cryptocurrencies, whereas we prefer to offer our customers a range of software for securing and timestamping data but also simplifying their procedures by making them all digital. Today, our main solutions are Catalizr and Blockchainiz. Catalizr is a digital investment solution specially designed for the financial sector. It allows an investment to be made in 1 hour, whereas the current paper process takes up to 3 months. This solution is mainly used by players in the unlisted securities sector as well as real estate investment companies. Blockchainiz, on the other hand, can be considered as an access provider to Blockchains. From the simple connection to the use of the smart contract platform, we support our customers by defining the outlines of their project, their prototype, but also in the implementation of business Uses Cases.

What do your customers look for when they use UTOCAT?

Above all, our unique expertise! We are one of the few players in the sector to implement ad-hoc solutions and to use the Ethereum and Bitcoin public Blockchains. Then, it’s our “agile” side that seduces them. We have a good knowledge of the financial sector and therefore a good knowledge of our clients’ procedures, it allows us to be reactive on their different requests.

Are you experiencing any particular difficulties right now?

Well, yes. The main one being hiring! It’s increasingly difficult to find senior developers. As a result, management with this type of profiles is not the same as managing junior profiles.

What are Utocat’s development objectives?

Our primary objective is to remain an expert and leader in the use of the Blockchain in the financial sector. At the same time, we are accelerating the deployment of our solution Catalizr in France and plan to deploy it in Europe next year.

Why did you choose Clever Cloud?

At first, our infrastructure was based on a private cloud computing offering. At the time the Docker’s learning curve was too long compared to our expectations, the administration of the system took a long time. There was also a great tangle of problems between development and technical architecture and managing all this with a mainly junior team was not easy. Since then, we have switched to Clever Cloud and we are delighted. It’s much simpler and you are much more efficient.

What do you prefer about Clever Cloud?

The support! The team is very reactive and it’s a real argument for your service, so don’t change anything!

If you could, what would you improve at Clever Cloud?

If we could, we would improve the dashboard. The ability to sectorize the environment and application context to simplify the management of daily applications would be a real plus for us. Indeed, this would simplify the sending of invoices or the management of rights. More information on www.utocat.com

Customer Testimonial – Sylvain Fabre – AssoConnect

Clément Nivolle — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:19:00 +0000

This week, Sylvain Fabre, CTO @ AssoConnect, tells us about the startup and his experience using Clever Cloud. Can you introduce AssoConnect? AssoConnect is a software for nonprofits. It is a SaaS application that helps them to save time on all the administrative tasks: Accounting (super easy, no need to be an accountant), Payments (donations, memberships, events, products), Members management (donors, members, volunteers...), Emailing, Website... The whole software is built for people who have absolutely no technical skill. We started in 2009 while we were students and involved in campus associations: we used to spend too much time on these boring administrative tasks and had not signed up for that. Today more than 1,500 nonprofits use AssoConnect and now focus on their missions. What do your users love about your product? Our nonprofit admins love to save time while providing a better service to their own users. We focus on the product and listen to our clients feedback to make AssoConnect easier and easier: users love when we implement their suggestions! What is your major difficulty at the moment? AssoConnect is growing quickly: having new clients means new use cases we have to consider. It's quite difficult to implement all the features requests while keeping AssoConnect relevant and easy to use for everyone. What is the next future of AssoConnect? We have a lot of new features coming! A major one is an update of our Algolia integration. We have been using this French hosted search API with faceting, typo-relevant and search-as-you-type features for a while within many features of AssoConnect. We are working on a much better user experience: an admin will be able to retrieve in a few milliseconds in a table and a map the female users who gave more than 100€ in less than 5 donations in the last 4 months living in France with a facet on their district and their age. Nonprofits need to know their contributors. Did you start AssoConnect on Clever Cloud? We started AssoConnect on a shared hosting competitor, then we discovered PaaS with another competitor and landed on Clever Cloud when we hit the competition hosting limits. Unlike the competition, Clever Cloud hosting offers auto-scaling which is useful to only pay for what you need while having as much power as you need. Switching was easy as we only use common and open source products like PHP or MySQL. What do you like most on Clever Cloud? The interface and products are no-brainers and the team availability helps you fix bugs quickly. This is what we like most at Clever Cloud. This really makes a difference when you need some help in your work. What feature are you expecting the most? By far I really expect automatic scaling for MySQL and Redis add-ons like for PHP instances so technical matters won't be an issue while my company grows. Automatic replication and failover would be useful too but they can configure it, you just have to ask the support. I'm also waiting for Let's Encrypt SSL certificates but heard it's coming. How would you pitch Clever Cloud to a non-technical person? Clever Cloud is like an all-star house-keeping service: when you go home you don't want to think about cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, Wifi and TV setup, any boiler fixing... You just need a functional house ready to live in.

Customer Testimonial – Ivan Zindovic – DAN Paris – TBWA Worldwide

Clément Nivolle — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 15:59:00 +0000

This week, Ivan Zindovic, Agency Manager @ DAN Paris (TBWA Worldwide), tells us about his experience using Clever Cloud for a high traffic website: Batman VS Superman. Can you introduce DAN Paris? DAN Paris is a digital agency of the TBWA Group. We have created the brand DAN five years ago, we are located in Paris, are a team of 70 people and are focused in delivering digital solutions for the communication of our customers. DAN stands for Digital Art Network, it's the network of digital agencies at TBWA. We have many different ways to collaborate with all the entities of the group. Sometimes we act as business introducer for design specialized agencies, sometimes they bring their own clients to us when they need digital solutions : apps, websites, social media, motion design... What is your close future at DAN Paris? We are shipping more and more mobile apps with IoT projects, many projects on bots and machine learning too. Our clients come to us with problems. We are the ones they hire to find solutions. That's why we do all this tech watch, research and development, etc... We work with a lot of very large companies. Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges? Most of the time, our customers want us to use their hosting provider or their own installations. In order to guarantee a certain level of service, we do our best to make the proper choices in terms of technology and of hosting providers. Many of our clients are still in a bare metal server way of thinking for their IT projects. That means each project is a new physical server I have to order, install, set up and obviously, I document each step of the process. All that is pretty useless. We do, as much as possible, virtualized servers projects mostly because we, as a digital agency, have to be really reactive. So, we can't wait 3 weeks for a server to be operational when our clients ask us to ship something tomorrow. How did you discover Clever Cloud and when did you start using it? That's a long story but it ends well. In 2007, we started to make our first projects on virtualized machines. The leader at that moment was pretty reactive so we started to work with them. Even if there were virtual servers, upscaling was pretty easy but downscaling was not. Curiously... And every time, for each project, we had to set up a machine with a disk image. That was repetitive and useless. Most of the time, upscaling implied another server and therefore, we had to manage load balancing. We were mixing virtual and physical servers. Nonsensical. Video streaming was even more complicated... That partner started to become procedural with tons of documents to fill in even for the exact same servers or same architectures. In 2009, a challenger landed on the market and looked way better than this first partner. They promised the implementation of "Chef" in order to industrialize our projects but, at the end, same problems: server is down, FTP is not working, that port is not open... Always something different from the previous project. I saw a conference of Quentin Adam at Paris Web in 2009 about JavaScript server-side and I found him brilliant. The next day, I followed him on Twitter. Soon after that, my hosting partner failed during a project. At that time, it was the very beginning of PaaS. The main problem was that I had to adapt my development to use their services. In addition, the per minute pricing grid was not very understandable for my clients. A couple of months after, I heared a podcast with Quentin Adam explaining everything about Clever Cloud: automation, vertical and horizontal auto-scalability, blue/green deployments, no-human on production, own Linux distribution... I thought that guy is a genius, I need to try this out. Three clicks after that, my app was online and I had nothing to worry about.

To secure the load peaks, especially for the launch of the movie, we needed a very scalable platform. That's when I thought, this is it ; this is when we must use Clever Cloud.

Few months after, we have been reached by Warner Bros to offer a complete digital proposal for the release of the movie "Batman VS Superman". In order to secure the load peaks, especially for the launch of the movie, we needed a very scalable platform. That's when I thought, this is it ; this is when we must use Clever Cloud. Everything went perfectly. After that we started more and more projects on Clever Cloud and very soon, all our projects will be on Clever Cloud. Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous hosting provider? We saved time. In our position, time is a lot of money. We saved projects. In our position, projects mean clients. Was it simple to switch from your previous hosting provider? Yes. What do you like most on Clever Cloud? It's simple. What features are you expecting the most? We are happy with the product as it is now. All the team loves it. How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn't use it yet? It's like electricity. You don't want to manage a nuclear power plant. You just want the light on. Same thing for apps on Clever Cloud. It's the aspirin of hosting: no more headaches.

Customer Testimonial – Victor Lambert & Florian Jardin – Filengo

Clément Nivolle — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:19:00 +0000

This week, Victor Lambert & Florian Jardin, CTO & CEO @ Filengo, tell us about their startup and why they chose Clever Cloud.

Customer Testimonial – Alexandre Leglise & Mathieu Gobert – INTIA

Clément Nivolle — Wed, 10 May 2017 11:45:00 +0000

This week, Alexandre Leglise, CCO & Mathieu Gobert CEO & CTO @ INTIA tell us about their company INTIA and their experience using Clever Cloud. INTIA helps small companies to save time with integrated quotation-invoice solutions and focus on what really matters instead. Can you introduce INTIA? Many small businesses are struggling with day to day administrative management: customer relationship, invoicing, billing and so forth. It too often leads up to managerial difficulties and even sometimes closure. At INTIA, we believe that all companies should enjoy and make the digital shift with ease. And that is why we aim to build advanced digital solutions for small companies and their partners. Small companies do save time with integrated quotation-invoice solutions and are therefore able to develop further by focusing on what really matters instead. 📄 + 🤖 = ❤️ Today more than 1,000 companies are using the INTIA business management solution with the possibility of sharing data online with their accounting firm. Its user experience is characterised by simplicity and efficiency, online as well as offline. We are 3 in the team: Mathieu Gobert CEO & CTO, Alexandre Léglise CCO & Laétitia Faudot CSO. How did you come up with the idea? Actually, one of Mathieu’s friend asked me to find a quotation-invoice solution which fit to his requirements: simple, mobile and multi-users. As Mathieu didn’t find any suitable solution on the market, he decided to built it! What do your users love about your product? Our users love the simplicity: no installation, no training, no settings. They can start to work with INTIA immediately. On top of that, we offer the same user experience with our without Internet. Users sometimes do not notice it but they are really happy to access to their quotation-invoice web app whenever they want. What is your major difficulty at the moment? Until now we are a small team of 3 and the solution relies therefore on few people. Fortunately we plan to hire 2 additional teammates this year. What is the coming future of INTIA? As a startup it is difficult to know where we will be in 5 years. Obviously we want to go as far as possible. We are permanently in touch with our users and for the coming future, we really want to deliver the highest proposition value to allow our customers to enjoy invoicing. And that’s a very exciting challenge! To do that we will offer new features as payment facilities and electronic signature. What do you like most on Clever Cloud?

Without Clever Cloud I think we couldn’t sleep

Quentin’s beard and GIFs! Seriously, without Clever Cloud I think we couldn’t sleep. Today, if there is any problem, the server is automatically restarted in 47s. Awesome :) On top of that, support is reactive and downtime very low. What feature are you expecting the most? More monitoring on your server and DB to know when we need increase scalability & Elasticsearch support! How would you pitch Clever Cloud to a non-technical person? If you want to totally forget hardware layer and focus on what your customers do with your app, use Clever Cloud. Learn more : intia.fr

Customer Testimonial – Sébastien – Fiscalité & Territoire

Clément Nivolle — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 17:16:00 +0000

This week, Sébastien CTO @ Fiscalité & Territoire tells us about the challenges the company faces on a daily basis and his experience using Clever Cloud. Fiscalité & Territoire offers both consultancy and software for regional authorities to optimize their taxation revenue optimization. Can you introduce Fiscalité & Territoire? We are a consulting company on taxation revenue optimization for regional authorities such as municipalities, intercommunalities, districts, counties, departments, regions... The State, via the Directorate-General of Taxes (DGI), produces large documents about taxation revenue and dotations and send them to regional authorities. Our core mission is to help the regional authorities to automate the process of making these docs searchable, readable and understandable. We have two services. The first one is traditional consulting with taxation experts consultants who help the regional authorities in their revenue optimization. The second one is the edition of a dedicated software which help both consultants and customers to optimize the use of their dotation by budgetting more precisely. How did you come up with the idea? In some regional authorities, there are some taxation experts but, most of the time, especially in small entities, it's a skill no one has. This is why regional entities rely on external consultants. But, in larger entities, the amount of data to deal with is so big that it is not really humanly possible. These are the two main reasons of our existence and growth. It is also why we offer two value propositions: consulting and software. What do your users love about your product? Mostly, the fact that we offer an online experience make us really different from the competition. We made that choice quite early in our industry and today, it helps to win deals. Our interface is getting better and better also. We have invested time and hired experts to make it even better. What is your main difficulty at the moment? Clearly the volume of data we have to manage to offer a service to our customers. With that amount of data, switching from one database scheme to another is a real challenge. Avoiding legacy too and it's even more crucial. What is the coming future of Fiscalité & Territoire? We are migrating our Database. It is a very large PostgreSQL database of 400 GB of data. Even if we offer our product in SaaS, we migrate on a per customer basis. We don't migrate all our customers at once. The main reason is because we have to train them. This kind of migration is also possible because each customer's data is partitioned. Why did you switch to Clever Cloud and was it easy?

[…] I quickly saw that the custom support was a real advantage

Some time ago, we were a tech team of 3 people. There was a system administrator, another developer and myself. The system administrator left and quickly I was alone. I was used to deploy on other kinds of PaaS and I didn't want to manage all the system administration issues. For legal issues, our hosting had to be physically located in France. Therefore, I searched on the web for a French cloud PaaS. We started to talk about our needs and I quickly saw that the custom support was a real advantage. What do you like most on Clever Cloud? The custom touch. For instance, we needed a Windows Server because we have a plugin for Excel exports. Same thing for Tableau, the Business Intelligence products. We asked, Clever Cloud added it, just for us. The Elasticsearch cluster is also very cool. What feature are you expecting the most? A lot! There are so many emails I've sent you ;-) Today, maybe the most important thing to me is to be able to view server performances. I've had access to your private beta of your coming tool. I think you are still working on it. How would you pitch Clever Cloud to a non-technical person? It's a bit like us. Just like our customers externalize very specific skills: taxation consultancy ; we externalize all the system administration to Clever Cloud. Just like our customers trust us for the advices we provide, we trust you for the security of our data.

Customer Testimonial – Philippe Sultan – Ottspott

Clément Nivolle — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 12:19:00 +0000

This week, Philippe Sultan, CTO @ Apidaze, editor of Ottspott, tells us about his experience using Clever Cloud. Can you introduce Ottspott? Ottspott allows to link a Slack team to one or more phone numbers and to answer or call with these phone numbers. Basically, it's a simple phone system for Slack users. On Clever Cloud, we host the Ottspott application in two versions, the website and the desktop app encapsulated in a webview. Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges? We need our application to be up all the time (like everyone else), but latency is an important parameter in our case. For example, the received phone calls have to be displayed as soon as possible to our users. That's why latency has to be reduced to its minimum. Today, we are below the quarter of a second for events' notifications; which is pretty good. How did you discover Clever Cloud? We were looking for a French hosting provider for Ottspott and we found Clever Cloud searching on the Internet. When did you start using it and what do you think? It has been a year and a half since we started using Clever Cloud and are very satisfied. Integration tutorials are clear and exhaustive. We specifically like the platform's flexibility to deploy newer versions of our application, it's painless for our users. And the support is top-level. Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous hosting provider? We especially saved time externalizing DevOps tasks to a performing hosting provider. Previously we hosted ourselves our applications. This saved time is very important in terms of organization and development speed. It allowed us to exclusively focus on the core of our application. Was it simple to switch hosting provider? Yes. Actually, we had a set of virtual machines on which we were maintaining the OS, the necessary libraries for our application and the app itself. We also had performance and availability problems on those machines; therefore changing hosting provider was necessary. What do you most like on Clever Cloud? Clever Cloud is simple to use, performant and improved our efficiency. These points are fondamental for us. What features are you expecting the most? I've heard something about http/2, I think that if it's not already implemented, it shouldn't last long. How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn't use it yet? Clever Cloud is a platform which makes developers' life easier.

Customer Testimonial – Nicolas Leroux – Lunatech

Clément Nivolle — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 15:19:00 +0000

This week, Nicolas Leroux, CEO & Owner @ Lunatech, tells us his journey using Clever Cloud across all the projects his company is working on. Can you introduce Lunatech and some of the projects you already host on Clever Cloud? Lunatech specialises in custom solutions with emphasis on integration of diverse information systems. We have intimate knowledge of both Java and Scala. We are using Clever Cloud for all our internal applications, for deploying our POC and for some of our customers. Lately we developed and deployed a Golf management system that is going to be used by a lot of golfers and golf clubs. Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges for the projects you work on? Can you share some metrics per project to give us an idea? We are mainly using Clever Cloud to perform continuous delivery. We code and enhance the applications without our customers noticing it. It allows us to be extremely agile and to release software every day. This means we can have immediate feedback on new features and improve the software continuously. We are also working closely with Clever Cloud to propose this solution to more traditional customers that would benefit from a shorter release cycle. How did you discover Clever Cloud? We discovered Clever Cloud soon enough via Internet because Lunatech is building software using Play Framework and Scala. We also talked a lot to Quentin Adam, the CEO of Clever Cloud. When did you start using it and what do you think ? We started using it for internal applications which are at the heart of Lunatech. Without Clever Cloud we would not be able to send invoices to our customers ;) We naturally extended this experience to our customers. Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous/other hosting providers? I don't think we saved money per say, we however gain a lot of flexibility and a better time to release. It also allows us to give better services to our customer, which is very important for us. Was it simple to switch hosting provider? Yes it was. What do you most like on Clever Cloud? The fact that we don't need to think much and it is really reliable. What features are you expecting the most? No idea. Right now we are fully satisfied with it. Maybe some FTP servers for some of our client (legacy systems ;) ) How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn't use it yet? I would not mention it ;) It is currently a competitive advantage we have over other service companies, I want to keep it secret :)

Customer Testimonial – François Guillaume – iAdvize & Redsmin

Clément Nivolle — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 17:18:00 +0000

This week, François-Guillaume, architect & lead dev @ iAdvize, tells us his journey using Clever Cloud across three startups he has been involved in. Can you introduce the projects you host on Clever Cloud? Of course. We started our professional relationship with Clever Cloud when we looked at PaaS host offering for Bringr. Bringr was a startup I co-founded in 2010 that allowed brands to watch, understand and communicate on social media. Our clients (Lagardère, Eram, Carambar, BNP Paribas...) used Bringr to set up real-time dashboards and were able to create their social media strategy and measure their publications' impact. Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges? Can you share some metrics with us to give us an idea? Time-to-market is key. Being able to develop locally a app and deploy it through git push and then delegate the deployment, monitoring and scaling is a real competitive advantage Clever Cloud offers. When we launched Bringr, I was managing 7 servers in a private network at Online. System administration and monitoring had a massive time impact on day-to-day work as a CTO. After two years and enough cash flow, we migrated to Clever Cloud and were able to focus even more on our product. How did you discover Clever Cloud? Every member of Clever Cloud team is very active in the Nantes tech ecosystem, I met Quentin and Clément at several occasions before even thinking about switching to Clever-Cloud. When did you start using it and what and what are your thoughts? We have been using Clever Cloud for more than two years. 99% of Bringr micro-services infrastructure is on Clever Cloud. Same for Redsmin. After Bringr was bought by iAdvize, we wanted to keep our competitive advantage, that's why part of iAdvize services are hosted on Clever Cloud. Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous hosting provider? Yes. Both. Was it simple to switch hosting provider? Most of Bringr and Redsmin applications are written in Node.js and Scala and require MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB. The migration was easy thanks to Clever Cloud DBaaS offering. Concerning our specific needs (for example we have a highly available RabbitMQ cluster), the Clever Cloud support team was always there to answer quickly and set up what we needed. What do you most like on Clever Cloud? Unequalled economical time-to-market. What features are you expecting the most? A complete access to instances and apps monitoring, Docker builds cache, private Docker registry and RabbitMQ plug'n'play add-on. Yes, I know, long list. How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn't use it yet? It's like AWS Beanstalk or Heroku but French, more secure and flexible with a brilliant and very reactive support.