There have been real dollar savings too: With Kubernetes, VSCO is running at 2x to 20x greater EC2 efficiency, depending on the service, adding up to about 70% overall savings on the company's EC2 bill. Adds Gattu: 'In man hours, that's one person versus a developer and a DevOps individual at the same time.' With an 80% decrease in time for a single deployment to happen in production, the number of deployments has increased as well, from 1200/year to 3200/year. The time from code-complete to deployment in production on real infrastructure went from one to two weeks to two to four hours for a typical service.

By moving to continuous integration, containerization, and Kubernetes, velocity was increased dramatically. Before, the time to first deploy was two days' hands-on setup time now it's two hours. 'We didn't really have a story around testing in a methodical way, and using reusable containers or builds in a standardized way.' There's a faster onboarding process now. ImpactBefore, deployments required 'a lot of manual tweaking, in-house scripting that we wrote, and because of our disparate EC2 instances, Operations had to babysit the whole thing from start to finish,' says Senior Software Engineer Brendan Ryan. VSCO also uses gRPC and Envoy in their cloud native stack. We started looking for a way to consolidate and be more efficient in the AWS EC2 instances.' SolutionThe team began exploring the idea of a scheduling system, and looked at several solutions including Mesos and Swarm before deciding to go with Kubernetes. Adds Naveen Gattu, Senior Software Engineer on the Community Team: 'That yielded a lot of wasted resources. The team containerized the microservices using Docker, but 'they were all in separate groups of EC2 instances that were dedicated per service,' says Melinda Lu, Engineering Manager for the Machine Learning Team. ChallengeAfter moving from Rackspace to AWS in 2015, VSCO began building Node.js and Go microservices in addition to running its PHP monolith.

Before and after vsco app