Bare Metal Cloud Helps My Party Album Inc. Lower Infrastructure Spending
My Party Album Inc. experiences an 80% drop in spending with Bare Metal Cloud compared to public cloud solutions.
My Party Album Inc. is a mobile content sharing app that makes it easy for multiple attendees of an event to share photos and videos in one place. The platform allows the event organizer to create a Party Album and invite guests to join and share their memories with everyone else. As a subscription-based business, My Party Album Inc. offers two pricing plans — Mixer and Party. With each plan, the user is charged a flat fee based on the number of people contributing photos and videos to an album.
From a technological standpoint, My Party Album Inc. is a file storage and processing application that heavily relies on the underlying server infrastructure. High-performance processing, fast read and write disk operations, storage capacity, and robust network connectivity are key to ensuring a seamless user experience. Capacity planning and resource scalability are two other major aspects that can have a direct impact on the app’s success. As the number of users and content size continue to grow, My Party Album Inc. has to be able to accommodate sudden increases in demand effectively without suffering service outages.
To achieve these technological objectives, My Party Album Inc. decided to leverage phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud infrastructure. As a singletenant dedicated server platform powered by automation, Bare Metal Cloud provides My Party Album Inc. with an easy-to-use infrastructure solution that delivers superior performance, global scalability, and more freedom to create custom environments.
“The team at phoenixNAP helped us understand their systems, and how we could grow with them. Moving to Bare Metal Cloud was a streamlined experience. The support team was fantastic in getting us up and running when we experienced issues.“
CHALLENGE
Before moving to Bare Metal Cloud, My Party Album Inc. first looked into leveraging public cloud solutions for hosting the app infrastructure. Having analyzed leading public cloud offerings, the development team concluded that the public cloud is not the ideal environment for them. They encountered four main roadblocks.
High public cloud costs
The My Party Album Inc. development team could not precisely predict public cloud compute costs. The team was looking for a straightforward pricing structure but realized that pricing models vary across different providers. Comparing public cloud pricing to more traditional infrastructure solutions, the team calculated that the public cloud offering was more expensive. With so many options to choose from, the My Party Album Inc. team had trouble determining which cloud services they needed to purchase to power the app.
Scalability planning
As with any video and photo sharing app, the ability to automatically scale resources based on demand is paramount for ensuring high availability. To achieve optimal resource consumption, app developers need to have a comprehensive understanding of the underlying infrastructure powering their workloads. In the case of My Party Album Inc., developers had trouble understanding public cloud systems and services. This made it difficult for them to plan for scalability and predict which resources they needed to deploy and scale in order to support growth. Another roadblock for the My Party Album Inc. development team was calculating the exact costs of scaling public cloud resources.
Difficulties learning proprietary public cloud technologies
More often than not, public cloud providers run their platforms on proprietary technologies. Learning how to best utilize these unique systems presented a great challenge for My Party Album Inc. developers. Apart from learning how to navigate complicated dashboards, they had to get familiar with provider-specific naming conventions, product lines, and pricing options. This steep learning curve suggested that the team had to spend more time learning how to navigate public cloud ecosystems instead of focusing on developing new features and optimizing the app. On top of this, vendor lockin was another major concern. To avoid getting locked into proprietary technologies, the team was looking for an infrastructure platform that relies on open-source technologies. Another roadblock for the My Party Album Inc. development team was calculating the exact costs of scaling public cloud resources.
Lack of technical support
Some businesses require hands-on technical support when migrating workloads from one IaaS solution to another. Public cloud providers often leave this to the user, since their main responsibility is managing the underlying server, storage, and networking infrastructure. This lack of technical support prompted the My Party Album Inc. development team to consider other options. They needed an IaaS provider that not only offers 24/7 technical support but also provides assistance in mitigating potential issues. In addition to this, the team was in search of a provider that has a comprehensive onboarding process in place which encompasses detailed explanations about how their systems work.
“Cost management was our main issue. We needed a solution that has a simple and transparent pricing structure in order to accurately calculate our month-to-month costs. We also needed a solution that was easy to understand and simple to use. The team at phoenixNAP helped us understand how BMC works and what we could do with it. The dashboard was easy to navigate and we did not have to learn how to use proprietary technologies.“
SOLUTION
The My Party Album Inc. team decided to run their workloads on phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud (BMC) platform. Following an extensive onboarding process, the team determined that BMC fully satisfies their needs and requirements.
BMC has a transparent and easy-to-understand pricing structure. This has made it easy for the team to calculate their exact month-to-month costs and predict future spending. BMC offers two simple pricing models — pay-per-use hourly pricing and monthly reservations. With hourly billing, My Party Album Inc. is charged a flat rate for the resource consumed on an hourly basis. To decrease spending further, the team can switch to monthly reservations at any moment. Reservations are available on a month-to-month basis, as well as 12, 24, and 36-month options with discounts increasing accordingly based on the length of the reservation.
This simple pricing structure has also made it easy for the My Party Album Inc. development to plan for scalability and growth without worrying about unexpected costs. The team can switch between 20+ server instance types to accommodate their compute, memory, storage, and networking needs. On top of this, BMC servers can be deployed and scaled globally across the US, Europe, and Asia. In contrast to virtual public cloud offerings, BMC servers run on physical hardware and are physically isolated from other users. This translates into exceptionally better performance, more control over security, and greater customization freedom.
Transitioning to BMC was a seamless experience for the My Party Album Inc. development team. The BMC technical support team oversaw the entire migration process and provided assistance in mitigating issues. In addition to this, there was no need for the team to spend too much time learning how to navigate the platform. BMC was built on top of open-source technologies and comes with a simple dashboard that makes it easy to deploy high-performance physical servers with a couple of clicks. Developers can also leverage various opensource Infrastructure as Code to manage their infrastructure with simple code instructions.
“Before BMC, we had little experience with using bare metal solutions. We were pleased to learn that scaling BMC servers is as easy as scaling virtual machines. BMC allows us to increase compute, memory, and storage resources on the go. This is especially important for us because the number of users and the amount of content they generate fluctuates. Plus, we can deploy and scale our servers globally to accommodate users from different parts of the world without worrying about latency.“
BENEFITS
As a turn-key infrastructure solution, BMC provided the My Party Album Inc. development team with all the resources and help they needed to get started quickly. After moving to BMC, the team experienced these four key benefits:
- Faster time to market — With help from the BMC support team, My Party Album Inc. was able to set up its servers and environments in days.
- No additional expenses for technical support
- Better cost to performance ratio — 80% lower costs with BMC compared to similar hardware performance with public cloud solutions.
- Faster scalability — Upgrading physical machines with a couple of clicks eliminates downtime and minimizes service unavailability.
“Costs for similar systems and performance with cloud-based services were night and day. However, with BMC, we found the best of both worlds — fantastic hardware performance at a lower cost. We can upgrade our servers on the go without trying to figure out which services we need to scale and how much that is going to cost us. With BMC, everything is upfront, transparent, and really easy to understand.“
AT•A•GLANCE
- CLIENT
My Party Album Inc - LOCATION
Ontario, Canada - BUSINESS FOCUS
Mobile content sharing app that allows multiple users to take photos and videos of memorable events and share them in one place - ISSUE
- High costs related to public cloud infrastructure
- Scalability planning with public cloud resources
- Difficulties learning proprietary public cloud technologies
- Lack of technical support from public cloud providers
- SOLUTION
phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud - RESULT
- Lower infrastructure costs, budget-friendly price to performance ratio
- Fast and easy infrastructure scaling across the globe
- User-friendly dashboard, no vendor lock-in or proprietary technologies
- Automated physical server provisioning measured in minutes
- Dedicated 24/7 technical support
