Contino Helps DueDil Accelerate Their Product Growth Through the Adoption of Google Cloud Platform [VIDEO]

The Client

DueDil is a predictive company-intelligence platform building the world’s most complete source of information on companies and the people behind them. DueDil’s powerful API and web platform (www.duedil.com) provide its clients with the data and tools to target, assess and onboard SMEs at scale.

DueDil uses proprietary matching technology to link billions of company data points from authoritative sources, providing unique insight through their Business Information Graph (B.I.G).

The Challenge

DueDil has ambitious growth plans for its SaaS products, which provide real-time company intelligence to some of the world’s largest financial institutions. The business is working firstly to substantially increase their user-base while improving performance and, secondly, to execute on a product roadmap, including critical new products and features.

However, there was no way to achieve these goals within the limits of their complex, on-premises infrastructure on which their products were hosted. They were faced with overcoming the following challenges:

• Limited Scalability: the existing infrastructure lacked the flexibility to scale to comfortably handle a growing user base 
• Limited Resilience: the platform was struggling to meet uptime and error budget requirements 
• Slow Performance: data import processes were slow
• Limited Innovation: infrastructure limits meant they had a slow release cadence for new software products and features

I can’t recommend Contino highly enough. Their deep skills in cloud and DevOps were critical in helping us migrate to GCP and securing the technical foundation for our future growth as a business.

Avinash Bajaj, Senior Product Manager, DueDil

The Solution

DueDil made the decision to migrate entirely to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This would lend their tech stack all the flexibility and availability they needed, while reducing the technical debt that had built up around their custom solutions over the years. It would bring the added benefit of giving DueDil access to GCP’s powerful cloud-native tooling as well as opening up their capability to innovate at speed and scale.

The migration was part of a wider move towards becoming a mature technical organisation. This would involve creating a vibrant engineering culture that is capable of operating autonomously in a cloud-native environment using DevOps practices and would require upskilling in GCP best practices as well as cloud-native and DevOps approaches.

DueDil partnered with Contino to help them to migrate their core applications to GCP while adopting best practices and upskilling their teams so that they can operate autonomously in the future.

Contino delivered:

GCP Assessment and Setup: An assessment of the existing GCP account and migration effort, a gap analysis to discover where enhancements were needed, and a course-correction of DueDil’s existing GCP implementation to a production-grade setup.

Cloud-Native Best Practices: Alignment with GCP best practices to ensure that the environment meets enterprise-grade security and governance best practices.

Migration of Critical Applications: Contino migrated DueDil’s core customer offering—the DueDil API—as well as their web application to GCP. From this pilot migration, Contino created a runbook to guide the migration of future applications at scale.

Cloud-Native Application Refactoring: Some applications were refactored from monoliths into microservices in order to increase availability and agility in the cloud.

Guidance and Upskilling: Contino worked with Google to put together a training plan for DueDil’s teams, including cloud-native tooling such as Istio and Kubernetes alongside more process-driven training such as DevOps. These were turned into permanent training materials that can be used as part of their engineering on-boarding processes.

The Business Outcome

DueDil now has the infrastructure and the skills to accommodate their ambitious growth plans.

The core service is many times more available, resilient and high-performing 

Their core service offering is many times more responsive and better performing. In addition, their infrastructure has the scalability and resilience to handle their future growth plans.

Deployment time has been reduced from days to 30 minutes to enable innovation

Their developers are no longer limited by their infrastructure and have reduced deployment time from days to just 30 minutes in most cases. They now have the throughput to deliver on DueDil’s product roadmap for 2020, including the critical International Data offering.

Cloud-native tooling offers scope for better service and rapid product innovation

DueDil can now start tapping into the cloud-native tooling that GCP offers, such as sophisticated monitoring and big data tools that they can use to gain insights into their users, app performance and to improve their products.

Cultivated cloud-native skills and culture

The company is now moving towards a more mature technical organisation, with an enterprise-grade cloud platform and in-house cloud-native skills and training materials.

"I can’t recommend Contino highly enough. Their deep skills in cloud and DevOps were critical in helping us migrate to GCP and securing the technical foundation for our future growth as a business. Culturally, they inspired a shift towards a mature and independent engineering organisation, always going the extra mile to ensure that we had the skills and knowledge to manage the new platform over the long term. DueDil is now in a much stronger position to unleash our ambitious product roadmap for 2020!"

Avinash Bajaj, Senior Product Manager at DueDil