Supporting enterprise SaaS demand with dedicated Kubernetes-based web hosting

With the objective of gaining faster support and optimizing hosting expenses, Smartsheet engaged amazee.io to migrate their Drupal websites from their previous hosting provider to our Lagoon hosting platform. Smartsheet, a collaborative platform for dynamic work, is used by over 90% of the Fortune 100 and companies in 190 countries. Smartsheet is built to break down barriers, empower people to work dynamically, and achieve more than they thought was possible. In terms of engagement, Alexa ranks smartsheet.com in the top .004% of sites worldwide. As such, it receives massive amounts of traffic and transfers large amounts of data and requests.

At a glance:

• 21GB per hour of data transfer
• 330k requests per hour
• 15 minute response SLA
• Autoscaling by 4x so far

amazee.io supports 17 different Smartsheet developers across multiple time zones who deploy to Lagoon daily. When questions arise – big or small – amazee.io is there to respond directly in Smartsheet’s private Slack channel – usually within minutes.

Smartsheet Software Development Manager, Corné de Leeuw says "Our experience with amazee.io has been exceptional so far. From the moment we first spoke to them when we were looking for a new hosting partner, they have been highly responsive to our needs. Since then, they have been very involved on a daily basis, proactively identifying and handling issues as they happen. They are very responsive at all levels of the company and typically respond to our inquiries within minutes, instead of hours, like we were used to with our previous hosting provider. Our support experience and the quality of our hosted services has improved significantly since we started working with amazee.io.”

Leveraging Smartsheet’s own cloud service infrastructure and EKS managed Kubernetes Service, amazee.io was responsible for provisioning it to run Lagoon and assumed ongoing responsibility for maintenance and support. Their dedicated cluster is built to instantly autoscale to meet traffic peaks, whether stemming from a press release, marketing campaign, or a live virtual event. During a large event, their infrastructure autoscaled by a factor of four immediately to handle the stress on the system. This would not have been possible with Smartsheet’s previous hosting provider.

Smartsheet also leverages amazee.io’s CDN and WAF tooling which add an extra layer of protection against malicious activity, while also delivering maximum uptime and performance. A set of WAF rules deployed on the amazee.io CDN blocks many common attacks from even reaching the cluster. 

At the cluster level, we enabled the open-source tool ModSecurity on the ingress routers. This heads off more advanced attacks like SQL-injections and execution of nefarious scripts. This tiered approach to security removes the burden from Drupal to intervene and conserves the resources that would be required to handle such attacks at the application level. With proactive monitoring amazee.io is by Smartsheet’s side 24/7 whenever questions or concerns arise. Issues are few and far between, but we maintain a fifteen minute SLA around the clock and often respond within minutes.

With Smartsheet’s team of highly skilled developers – some of whom are even Drupal Core contributors – amazee.io maintains a trusted partnership that’s built around a shared passion for open-source web development. 

Ready to discuss upgrading your web hosting platform, improving your support experience, and optimizing your resources? Reach out!