From the beginning of my career, I’ve been involved with managing servers, network infrastructure, and application support. When I worked at PeopleSoft, we ran server farms that deployed their software for education centers. When I started Runtriz, the concept of hosting tools for small enterprises was still many years away. It was during this time that I became a Rackspace customer. We rented two servers from them to start our first server farm.

Over the course of many years our infrastructure at Rackspace grew into their cloud offering where we began the practice of deploying many virtual instances and using automation platforms, such as Chef, to keep everything in sync. Through the Rackspace cloud we managed every tier of our application from databases to load balancers and everything in between. We built our own Percona clusters, HA-Proxy redundant services, and PHP application environment. During this time, I was responsible for architecting, deploying, and managing the infrastructure. It was a small shop…

After being devoted Rackers (Rackspace customers) I began to explore options that would allow us to shift all of our infrastructure management resources and energy into product development and delivery. I immersed myself in the AWS culture and became an AWS Solutions Architect to help certify my knowledge and understanding. I knew that Amazon’s offering would be a better fit for the direction of the platform so we migrated all of our services to Amazon. Amongst many benefits from migrating to AWS, we instantly realized major cost savings due to the nature of the AWS cloud vs the OpenStack cloud at Rackspace. We used Terraform instead of Chef and embraced CI/CD. It was a game changer for Runtriz.

Now, nearly 15 years since we started Runtriz and now we’ve moved to a containerized and serverless environment fully hosted in the AWS cloud. The Runtriz network serves millions of clients each year where an incredible number of requests and conversations take place around the globe. We’re out of the business of managing servers and in the business of building and delivering product. It has been a highly dynamic and fun journey - I can only imagine what is to come.