Seamless transition to Kubernetes: Ninetailed's path to production with Qovery

Key points:

• Bypassing the Kubernetes Learning Curve: Facing a tight timeline for a funding round, Ninetailed avoided a 12-month Kubernetes implementation cycle, using Qovery to get a production-ready EKS cluster running in under an hour.
• Unlocking Developer Autonomy: By leveraging Qovery’s Ephemeral Environments, Ninetailed’s developers can now spin up isolated staging replicas and debug their own deployments, completely eliminating the DevOps testing bottleneck.
• Automated Security & Secrets: With strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and native Doppler integration, Ninetailed secured their production environments while eliminating the manual toil of syncing secrets across their infrastructure.

For a high-growth startup, infrastructure cannot be a bottleneck. When Ninetailed (a leading composable personalization and experimentation platform) needed to scale their backend services ahead of a critical funding round, they knew they had to evolve their DevOps practices.

Instead of getting bogged down by operational overhead, they needed a way to optimize their deployment processes and adopt Kubernetes rapidly. I sat down with Sebastian, Head of Engineering, and Francois, DevOps Engineer at Ninetailed, to discuss how they implemented Qovery's Kubernetes management platform to jump from proof-of-concept to production in record time.

Ninetailed Introduction

Ninetailed offers a composable personalization (see guide) and experimentation solution that seamlessly integrates with popular content management systems like Contentful. With Ninetailed, teams can easily create personalized experiences and A/B tests for different audience segments based on past behavior and contextual data, tailoring content across websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels.

Learn How Qovery Helped Ninetailed Scale Their Infrastructure

Moving Towards Self-Service Infrastructure for Faster Scaling

Initially, Ninetailed's front-end applications ran on Vercel, with Cloudflare workers serving as the serverless service workers for their main API. While their edge delivery is (and will remain) serverless to ensure they are the fastest personalization tool on the market, they needed a different solution for standard APIs requiring CRUD operations, databases, and message queues.

They began exploring a more traditional application setup using Node.js. They sought a deployment solution that would facilitate quick setup while laying a robust foundation for future scalability. As a startup racing toward a rapid fundraising round, establishing an infrastructure that could handle growth without bottlenecks was mission-critical. They wanted to seamlessly manage multiple apps, assign roles, and ensure smooth production deployments.

A Desire to use Kubernetes but a Stiff Learning Curve and a Long setup

Eager to leverage Kubernetes, the team faced a daunting reality: a steep learning curve and a time-consuming setup process.

Sebastian, having prior experience with Kubernetes, understood the potential difficulties. In a previous role, moving from on-prem to Kubernetes took an entire year. Considering their plan to raise funds within three to four months, Ninetailed simply couldn't afford a year-long training and implementation period. While they initially considered managing their own EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), they quickly realized they needed a more efficient solution to get running before the funding round, without compromising on architecture.

Qovery: The Perfect Solution to be Production Ready with Kubernetes in no Time

During their research, they discovered Qovery. With just one initial call, they had Qovery set up within an hour, with the bulk of their configuration instantly completed.

After a brief proof of concept (POC), they seamlessly transitioned to production. Sebastian handled the initial setup, and once everything was running, Qovery's fully managed service required minimal ongoing involvement. The Qovery dashboard became quiet as their single app ran smoothly with automatic deployments.

As the team expanded, François joined as the first dedicated DevOps engineer. By the time he arrived, Ninetailed already had their production environment running on Qovery, hosting several NestJS applications and associated databases. Setting up staging environments was a breeze. Over time, they gradually scaled up and now run over a dozen applications seamlessly on the platform.

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Key benefits after several months of using Qovery

1. Increase Developer Autonomy

Developers have experienced a massive boost in autonomy, particularly when testing on staging, thanks to Qovery's Ephemeral Environments. While they still ask DevOps for assistance with complex infrastructure changes, developers use Qovery's clean UI to navigate the system, access logs, and perform test deployments. If a staging deployment fails, developers can quickly refer to the logs to identify the root cause independently.

2. Less Workload for the DevOps in Place

Deploying applications with just a few clicks is incredibly powerful for François. It frees up his time to concentrate on high-impact tasks, like exploring new integrations that benefit the broader team. This streamlined process eliminates the need for developers to rely heavily on DevOps for testing, removing internal bottlenecks.

3. Enhancing Control and Security with RBAC Implementation

As the company grew, Ninetailed implemented Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure safe platform usage. François and Sebastian hold admin control over both staging and production. Developers are granted viewing rights on production, but full rights on staging. This allows developers to test freely while protecting production infrastructure from accidental missteps.

4. Streamlined Secrets with Doppler Integration

‍Ninetailed recently took advantage of Qovery’s native Doppler integration. While they had successfully managed environment variables using Doppler previously, injecting them into the deployment pipeline used to require manual intervention. Now, keeping secrets automatically synced across all their tools and applications is an effortless reality, closing a crucial gap in their security workflow.

What’s Next for Ninetailed

Ninetailed has an exciting roadmap ahead, focusing heavily on an API-first approach. They are expanding their offerings to ensure that every feature is available both through their UI and as an API. They are also committed to enhancing integrations with content sources, analytics solutions, and diverse data sources to provide seamless connectivity for their users.

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