Startups Services

Startups and small businesses often face the problem of lack of technical talents. Hiring the top talents is hard, as most of them prefer working for IT services providers. Why? Because routine and stagnation are deadly for professionals and working at Managed Services Providers like IT Svit offers a huge variety of tasks and projects, so there is no place for boredom or burnout. In addition, startups are often limited on funds, so paying the six-digit salary an A-grade talent expects is not an option. 

This is why the startups and small businesses that want to obtain top-notch technical expertise have to partner with Managed Services Providers companies. This way everybody gets a win-win situation:

• Talents get a variety of IT outsourcing projects to keep them interested and growing
• Companies get top-notch startup consulting services at affordable prices
• Small businesses get their products delivered fast and with high quality.

1. Startups contact us with their ideas, usually when they get seed funding and need technical expertise to build a Proof of Concept or Minimum Viable Product
2. We help the startups build cost-efficient cloud infrastructure for their software delivery process and production environments. We provide dedicated teams that are skilled with PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, JS, React.js and Node.js, Vue.js, AWS and Google Cloud, MS Azure and DigitalOcean, blockchain development, serverless computing, etc.
3. We deploy the CI/CD pipelines for software delivery using Terraform and Kubernetes for infrastructure provisioning and configuration, Jenkins and Ansible for configuring automated processes and workflows.
4. We enable in-depth cloud monitoring solutions using Splunk and SumoLogic, Datadog and ELK stack, Prometheus+Grafana, etc.
5. We help analyze the machine-generated data real-time using multiple Big Data tools like Jupyter Notebook, D3.js, Tableau, etc.
6. We help support the existing IT infrastructure and provide its optimization if need be. We perform the infrastructure audit to help define the bottlenecks, find the room for growth and implement the needed improvements
7. We can lift-and-shift the existing workloads to the cloud or help perform transition to cloud-native analogs

Thus said, IT Svit has all the possibilities and technical background to perform any kind of services a startup or small-to-medium business might need. Here is why small businesses actually benefit from such a collaboration.

Stage 1: Idea refinement

When the startup is ready to begin their way to success (the idea is chosen and the seed funding is secured), the question is whether the team has sufficient in-house expertise to build the product. In most cases, they don’t, so they have to obtain the needed expertise either by outsourcing to a Managed Services Provider or by trying to hire the needed talent. The latter is quite hard for the reasons explained above, which leaves small businesses with the only viable choice — working with a reliable contractor able to deliver the required team. 

Due to our rich experience with MVP development in various industries, we are able to pinpoint the future issues you are still unaware of, predict possible bottlenecks and suggest the ways to expand and improve both the product architecture and the IT infrastructure the customers design.

Stage 2: Building the infrastructure

Once we get an exact picture of what the customer WANTS, we are able to list the components they actually NEED to make it happen. Sometimes it is better to adjust the initial design and sometimes it is better to replace it completely. We know a lot about load balancing and scalability, so we plan ahead and build the infrastructure that is able to withstand high workloads should the need arise but does not cost you much while it is on idle standby.

We do it by following the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) concept, where all environment settings are codified in Terraform and Kubernetes manifests, stored within the Version Control System. This means that any environment can be easily and automatically provisioned when the need arises.

Stage 3: Configuring CI/CD pipelines

Automation of routine workflows is essential in the long run if you want to minimize the time-to-market for your product and diminish the expenses on running your IT infrastructure. CI/CD pipelines are processes and workflows that enable the developers to deploy development and testing environments and run unit tests without requiring Ops assistance even once. The same goes for releasing new product versions and features.

(CI) or Continuous Integration is a practice of developing code in small batches that are continuously tested with automated unit tests and merged into the main trunk often. Thus said, the risk of bugs and incompatibility is greatly reduced and the time needed for bug fixing is close to zero. This helps to shorten the time-to-market significantly. 

(CD) or Continuous Delivery is a practice of configuring various tools like Circle CI, GitLab CI, Jenkins and Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes to perform various actions on certain triggers. This allows the developers to spin up the dev environments and build the testing servers with a single command, by running a Terraform manifest. Thus said, the software delivery becomes much more productive and time-efficient. The same goes for updating the systems in production and releasing new product features — we automate everything that can be automated and leave no room for human error!

Step 4: Monitoring the production environments

Once the product is launched, it has to be monitored to ensure smooth performance in the production environment. There are multiple possible IT infrastructure performance bottlenecks and workflow drawbacks that can hamper the growth of your products. This is why IT svit is glad to provide technical consulting for startups and ensure their infrastructure is well-monitored and response scenarios for all kinds of issues are automated. 

Step 5: Implementation of bespoke Big Data analytics solutions

When your systems begin working, they deliver huge amounts of machine-generated data that can prove to be a goldmine of actionable insights for your business. Thus said, gathering this data from the logs and other sources, storing and processing it — all of this is essential to ensure the data is easily available. Visualizing it with some data visualization tools helps turn the tables and logs into simple to grasp graphs and pie charts, so you will be able to utilize the data at top efficiency.

Step 6: IT infrastructure support and optimization

This is yet another very popular area of technology consulting for startups. Businesses rarely grow as planned and have to make do with the resources and systems they own and adapt them to the best of their understanding. However, sometimes the IT infrastructure small businesses have to rely on is quite tangled, inefficient or straight forward outdated.

This is why one IT Svit competencies is IT infrastructure optimization and maintenance. We assess the way the things are done at the moment, identify possible bottlenecks and room for improvement, and implement the solutions that help make your infrastructure more cost-efficient, performant and resilient.

Step 7: Cloud transition and migrations between clouds

Whether startups begin their operations in the cloud or decide to migrate to it further along the road, a decision to change the hosting provider is an important one. Lots have to be accounted for and sometimes a redesign has to occur in order to drop the problems the business faces now and don’t drag them to a new platform. This is why a transition to the cloud or a cloud migration to another cloud service provider is a process that requires in-depth planning and ample hands-on expertise to be executed flawlessly.