Overview
Nextools, a company specializing in high-performance applications for e-commerce businesses, encountered significant challenges in managing multi-cloud deployments. Andrea Morone, Co-Founder and CTO, leads the company's technology strategy, focusing on app development, infrastructure, and cloud deployments. A key priority is ensuring that Nextools' applications meet the high-performance requirements of the Shopify platform.
The company is responsible for designing and maintaining a scalable infrastructure across multiple cloud providers (AWS and GCP), optimizing performance, ensuring high availability, and implementing automation to streamline operations. With a team of just five developers, efficiency and automation are essential for success.
Context & Challenges
Serving High-Performance Shopify Applications
Nextools builds applications for e-commerce businesses, primarily Shopify merchants, who require high-performance, scalable, and resilient solutions. These applications must handle high traffic volumes, particularly during peak shopping periods, ensuring a seamless experience for merchants and their customers. To support clients' needs across different regions, Nextools relies on multiple cloud providers, AWS and GCP.
Challenges Managing Multi-Cloud Deployments
Deploying and managing applications across AWS and GCP introduced significant complexity in orchestration, scaling, and maintenance. Each platform has different configurations, requiring time and expertise to manage workloads efficiently. Keeping infrastructure synchronized between AWS and GCP was a major challenge, adding to operational overhead.
Infrastructure Demands for Shopify Apps
Shopify's ecosystem requires high availability and low-latency applications. The infrastructure needed to handle dynamic traffic surges, ensure fast API responses, and provide near-zero downtime. This required sophisticated deployment strategies, failover mechanisms, and robust monitoring tools to maintain service reliability.
Pain Points Before Qovery
- Complexity in managing multi-cloud environments
- Manual deployment processes leading to delays
- Rollbacks were problematic, often triggering rebuilds instead of reverting to stable versions
- High operational overhead for infrastructure management
Before adopting Qovery, Nextools explored Kubernetes-native solutions like AWS EKS and GCP GKE, as well as Terraform for infrastructure automation. While these tools offered flexibility, they required extensive configuration and maintenance, increasing the operational burden.
The Solution: Partnering with Qovery
Why Qovery?
Qovery provided an abstraction layer that simplified multi-cloud deployments while integrating seamlessly with Nextools' existing stack. Its automation features reduced complexity, and its ability to manage multiple environments across cloud providers made it the ideal solution for their needs.
Simplifying Multi-Cloud Management
Qovery offered a unified interface to manage deployments across AWS, GCP, and other providers, eliminating the need for manual configurations. It automated key processes such as infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and rollbacks, significantly reducing deployment time.
Streamlined Deployment Processes
With Qovery, Nextools could deploy applications consistently across both cloud providers without needing platform-specific configurations. The built-in GitOps approach allowed for pushing changes via Git repositories, triggering automated deployments with minimal manual intervention. Previously, the GitLab pipeline required custom builds for each app—Qovery simplified this to just a push.
Unexpected Benefits & Key Features
- Monitoring & Rollbacks: Qovery's built-in monitoring and rollback capabilities improved incident response time. Frozen build states allowed easy rollbacks without triggering rebuilds.
- On-Demand Staging Environments: Quickly creating staging environments helped test features before production deployment.
- Global Region Deployment Efficiency: Deploying services to a new region (e.g., Asia) was reduced from 1-2 days to approximately 1 hour.
- Automatic Domain & SSL Management: Qovery streamlined domain association and SSL certificate management, further reducing manual tasks.
- Granular Access Control: Provided fine-grained access management without the complexity of AWS IAM.
Results & Outcomes
Operational Efficiency & Cost Savings
- Deployment time was significantly reduced, with new clusters taking about 30 minutes to deploy instead of days prior to Qovery.
- The team now manages over 100 deployments per app per month with minimal manual intervention.
- 0 maintenance needed, eliminating hiring needs and allowing the team to prioritize innovation.
Moreover, infrastructure management overhead was drastically reduced, allowing developers to focus on building apps instead of handling cloud complexities. This eliminated the need to hire a dedicated DevOps specialist or for Andrea to spend time learning intricate infrastructure management tasks.
Performance Improvements
- Achieved 99.99% uptime across all production environments.
- Faster response times for incident management and deployments.
- Seamless scaling during peak Shopify shopping periods, ensuring uninterrupted service for merchants.
Impact on Shopify & E-Commerce Clients
Qovery's automation and optimization allowed Nextools to concentrate on building and scaling Shopify apps rather than managing infrastructure. Clients benefited from:
- Faster load times
- Reliable uptime
- Smooth scalability during high-traffic events
With Qovery's help, Nextools also met the infrastructure requirements for Shopify's "Built for Shopify" certification, with two of their apps already achieving the status and eight more pending approval.
Transforming the DevOps Workflow
Before Qovery, managing a multi-cloud infrastructure would have required specialized DevOps personnel. By implementing Qovery:
- The need for a dedicated Kubernetes/cloud infrastructure specialist was eliminated.
- Developers could focus solely on application development.
- The transition to Qovery was smooth, with minimal workflow disruptions.
Final Word & Advice
Ready for the AI era
Nextools' infrastructure on Qovery is AI-agent ready. With Qovery's MCP Server and AI Skill, their team can deploy, debug, and optimize from Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent - with the same RBAC, audit trail, and compliance controls they already rely on.