How Charles.co tripled development speed and achieved zero downtime with Qovery

Charles.co is a digital clinic focused on providing men with discreet and easy access to sexual health information and specialist consultations. Over time, the company expanded its services to include other areas like hair loss, sleep disorders, and weight management.

Charles.co had a lean technical team of just five people, including their CTO. They faced a significant challenge: how to build and manage a reliable and scalable infrastructure without a dedicated DevOps engineer. The team's lead developer had some expertise, but Lucas Babey, Charles.co's CTO, wanted him to focus on developing features that would drive business value, not spend time on low-value tasks like configuring infrastructure.

Their initial solution, an old-school hoster, proved to be a bottleneck. The process for making changes was slow, expensive, and unreliable. It involved lengthy back-and-forths with the hosting provider, leading to long development cycles and what Lucas called "overvalued invoices." Most critically, deployments were risky and unstable, sometimes causing service outages.

The Solution: Qovery as an "Autopilot" DevOps Team

Charles.co turned to Qovery to solve their infrastructure challenges. Qovery's platform provided a layer of abstraction over cloud providers like AWS, allowing the Charles.co team to provision services with a simple web interface. This meant they could manage their infrastructure without needing to become DevOps experts themselves.

Lucas was particularly drawn to Qovery's ability to easily duplicate environments. With Qovery, they could create a pre-production environment that mirrored their production site with a single click. This feature also extended to "Preview Environments," where a developer could deploy a new feature to a dedicated, temporary environment to test it in real-world conditions before merging it into the main codebase.

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He also appreciated the human element of Qovery's support, noting that the team offers expert guidance and even assisted with the migration process, providing what he called "DevOps as a service."

Results

Qovery transformed Charles.co's development process and business operations, helping them overcome their infrastructure limitations.

• Elimination of Downtime: A major pain point for Charles.co was that every deployment caused a 3-minute service interruption. This was a significant risk, especially during active consultations or customer orders. With Qovery, those downtimes were completely eliminated, providing a more stable and reliable experience for both internal teams and customers.
• Cost and Resource Efficiency: While Charles.co initially over-provisioned resources during the migration to ensure stability, Qovery's features, like Karpenter, helped them scaling horizontally by spinning up multiple instances, and vertically by increasing memory and CPU capacity as needed. The team is actively working to reduce their AWS spend, a process that is made easier by Qovery's unified network and VPC management.
• Faster Development and Continuous Deployment: Qovery's platform made continuous deployment easier and faster. Before Qovery, only Lucas and one developer had deployment access. With Qovery, the entire team can deploy, which has dramatically increased their velocity in product delivery.
• Unlocking New Business Capabilities: The stability and ease of use provided by Qovery allowed Charles.co to tackle new projects that were previously impossible. For example, they were able to deploy a new Business Intelligence (BI) tool in just 30 minutes without writing a single line of code, something they could not have done with their previous setup.

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Conclusion

By adopting Qovery, Charles.co successfully navigated the complexities of managing a modern cloud infrastructure without hiring a dedicated DevOps team. Qovery acted as a critical partner, providing a platform that was both powerful and simple to use. The platform's automated features, combined with hands-on support, enabled the Charles.co team to focus on their core mission: building a better health platform for their customers.

As Lucas concluded, Qovery has "removed a burden" from the team and allowed them to build with confidence. They are now able to deploy multiple times a day if needed, with the peace of mind that their deployments will be safe and reliable. The experience of using Qovery was so positive that Lucas recommends it to other teams

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Interested in deploying as fast as Charles.co? Let’s start today!