Tikaro

Case Study

The Opportunity

Tikaro is a boutique “next generation” application development and design shop that builds websites that average millions of hits per month for global 200-sized customers.

Tikaro’s clients are becoming aware of the benefits rapid development with Ruby and Rails. As such, they are willing to dabble in what they had perceived to be an “experimental” or “new” platform—as long as it doesn’t compromise the security and polish they are used to with legacy application development platforms.

Tikaro has competent Rails programmers but is keenly aware the challenges Ruby and Rails presents. While it provides a “cushy environment to write code,” according to Tikaro owner John Young, “it is very challenging from the deployment point of view.”

Young notes that, while Ruby and Rails allows users to develop quickly, the applications themselves aren’t necessarily tuned to run quickly. If things like caching and distribution are not handled and optimized correctly, the application could "derail” quickly. “Learning brand new web servers that the Rails community likes to use is at least as hard as learning Apache for the first time,” said Young.

Tikaro was using a standard managed hosting provider for LAMP stack applications that did not support Rails, but was not comfortable with being responsible for keeping Rails up and running at 2 a.m. In fact, if Tikaro was unable to identify a good managed host specifically for Ruby on Rails, they were prepared to use another platform for application development. Bottom line—Tikaro was not interested in staying on the cutting edge of the Rails deployment technology and wanted to delegate or outsource that responsibility to someone else.

The Solution

Tikaro originally found Engine Yard with a Google search, after the initial interactions, realized that their expertise and offering was exactly what they were looking for.

Engine Yard was available to own the uptime headaches on behalf of Tikaro, their Rails in-house expertise was very attractive. From day one, Engine Yard proactively counseled on best practices, tricks, tips and gotchas, making it very clear to Tikaro they were working with expert programmers and engineers—not typical IT sales people. Specifically, Tikaro appreciated the ease of using an IRC chat room to get simple questions answered quickly rather than having to open a trouble ticket. Tikaro Owner, John Young, described Engine Yard as “…demonstrating a high degree of cluefulness.”

Results

Today, Engine Yard tunes Tikaro’s applications for speed with a special focus on caching, distribution, optimization and deployment.

Relying on Engine Yard’s expertise allows Tikaro to focus on their core competency—rapid application development—without having to sweat the details. “Engine Yard’s managed hosting services and expertise is a win-win in that we can program quickly and satisfy aggressive client deadlines, while also reducing the risk of a weird deployment that we’re not used to. The cost savings of the 24/7 sys-admin support from Engine Yard is a huge benefit,” said Young.

“We’re running very vanilla Rails apps with just a couple of gems through Engine Yard,” said Young. “We’ve had a lot less downtime than with other applications and Engine Yard has been responsible for the high degree of reliability.”

The companies have now been working together for more than a year and have never looked back. Young recommends Engine Yard to “anyone who does not have three shifts of Rails deployment-specific engineers.”

Young concludes, “Engine Yard hits a sweet spot of people who know what they want to get done and are competent Rails programmers, but don’t want to get a PhD in Rails deployment. Engine Yard has been doing a really good job of putting together a great team of ‘big-chair sys-admins’ on this platform so that I can focus more on my clients.”