Brendan Griffin,
DevOps Lead
DevOps Lead
“Anyone who’s going from SaaS to on-prem should seriously consider Replicated. The infrastructure they provide comes out of the box, and allows us to focus on our core competency, which is delivering SwaggerHub.”
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Company Size:
900
Industry:
Developer Tools
Challenge
SmartBear is the creator of SwaggerHub, which helps developers write software by enabling teams to do collaborative, design-first API development. It is a comprehensive API development lifecycle platform providing planning, testing, contract testing, and documentation.
SwaggerHub was originally deployed on-premises through a virtual machine. But, the cost of maintaining a virtual machine quickly grew to be unmanageable. The release process was tedious, and SmartBear’s customers continuously asked for a containerized deployment option. In 2019, the SwaggerHub team attempted a homegrown containerized solution using Helm Charts, but found that even this effort forced them to maintain both a VM and Helm charts since their containerized solution didn’t properly handle all their customers’ self-hosted use cases.
While the effort of maintaining an on-premises version of SwaggerHub grew in size and complexity, stopping the delivery of this product simply wasn’t an option. Only 5 - 10% of SmartBear’s customers were self-hosted, but those customers accounted for 50 - 60% of revenue. To add even more complexity, some of their most valuable customers within this category required an air gapped solution. SmartBear needed to streamline their on-premises deployments to free up valuable engineering resources (100+ hours required for every release), reduce their support ticket volume (70% of tickets were related to VM support), and increase their time to value (they only released a new version 4X/ year). With many areas to optimize and many problems to solve, they started their search for a better deployment option.
SwaggerHub was originally deployed on-premises through a virtual machine. But, the cost of maintaining a virtual machine quickly grew to be unmanageable. The release process was tedious, and SmartBear’s customers continuously asked for a containerized deployment option. In 2019, the SwaggerHub team attempted a homegrown containerized solution using Helm Charts, but found that even this effort forced them to maintain both a VM and Helm charts since their containerized solution didn’t properly handle all their customers’ self-hosted use cases.
While the effort of maintaining an on-premises version of SwaggerHub grew in size and complexity, stopping the delivery of this product simply wasn’t an option. Only 5 - 10% of SmartBear’s customers were self-hosted, but those customers accounted for 50 - 60% of revenue. To add even more complexity, some of their most valuable customers within this category required an air gapped solution. SmartBear needed to streamline their on-premises deployments to free up valuable engineering resources (100+ hours required for every release), reduce their support ticket volume (70% of tickets were related to VM support), and increase their time to value (they only released a new version 4X/ year). With many areas to optimize and many problems to solve, they started their search for a better deployment option.
“A lot of our big enterprise customers have requirements that their development tools be completely air gapped for both protecting intellectual property and for security concerns. Then, you even have issues around where data resides which also means that a lot of our customers need their tools to be completely on-prem.”
Barry Gleeson,
Sr. Product Manager
Sr. Product Manager
Solution
SmartBear tried building their own deployment solutions. First, with a VM for their on-premises customers and then by offering Helm Charts. After both experiences not going as expected, they now knew what they were looking for. “Once we developed Helm charts we were like ‘ok we can deploy’... but what about all the other things we need to do?” says Brendan Griffin, DevOps Lead. “How do we upgrade licensing? How do we troubleshoot with customers? And then, when we were looking at Replicated, we saw you could do both which really checked the boxes for us. We knew we could have one platform to satisfy both kinds of customers.”
Now, not only does SmartBear have one model that handles deployments for their high-value on-premises customers, but they’ve also massively improved the experience. For example, SmartBear’s releases are much faster and almost on-par with their SaaS product. Their on-premises release cadence increased from just 4 times per year to over 12, bringing new features and value to customers much more quickly.
The SmartBear team also found incredible value in Replicated’s support bundles and pre-flight checks, which helps their team troubleshoot and debug issues quickly while also preventing similar problems from plaguing additional customers. “Pre-flight checks have become a part of our customer support cycle, in that when we see issues are coming up for customers we can then put a pre-check in,” says Barry Gleeson, Senior Product Manager. “If we see just one customer having a problem, we can put a pre-flight check in to make sure every other customer gets this flagged earlier.” The SmartBear team was also able to set up this process in customers’ air gapped environments, bringing visibility and clarity into a notoriously difficult environment to debug.
By choosing Replicated, SmartBear was able to greatly improve the on-premises experience for their most valuable customers. Replicated’s impact can be seen in countless areas - from decreasing deployment time, to increasing release cadence, to streamlining support processes. With time and resources freed up from worrying about how they’re deploying their software, the SmartBear team can now shift their focus to what they do best - delivering SwaggerHub.
Now, not only does SmartBear have one model that handles deployments for their high-value on-premises customers, but they’ve also massively improved the experience. For example, SmartBear’s releases are much faster and almost on-par with their SaaS product. Their on-premises release cadence increased from just 4 times per year to over 12, bringing new features and value to customers much more quickly.
The SmartBear team also found incredible value in Replicated’s support bundles and pre-flight checks, which helps their team troubleshoot and debug issues quickly while also preventing similar problems from plaguing additional customers. “Pre-flight checks have become a part of our customer support cycle, in that when we see issues are coming up for customers we can then put a pre-check in,” says Barry Gleeson, Senior Product Manager. “If we see just one customer having a problem, we can put a pre-flight check in to make sure every other customer gets this flagged earlier.” The SmartBear team was also able to set up this process in customers’ air gapped environments, bringing visibility and clarity into a notoriously difficult environment to debug.
By choosing Replicated, SmartBear was able to greatly improve the on-premises experience for their most valuable customers. Replicated’s impact can be seen in countless areas - from decreasing deployment time, to increasing release cadence, to streamlining support processes. With time and resources freed up from worrying about how they’re deploying their software, the SmartBear team can now shift their focus to what they do best - delivering SwaggerHub.
SmartBear’s features are available to on-prem customers less than 2 weeks after they’re released to their SaaS customers.
“The #1 benefit for us is that our developers can spend less time doing infrastructure stuff and more time developing features for the application.”
Barry Gleeson,
Sr. Product Manager
Sr. Product Manager
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