Empowering Innovation: How Flowops Revolutionized Its Service Delivery with Ampt

Industry: DevOps, Incident Management

Use Case: Accelerating iteration speed for a young startup working in a mission-critical domain

Highlights:

• Flowops significantly accelerated their development cycle with Ampt, achieving in just three months what would have taken a year. This rapid pace was pivotal for their MVP rebuilds, allowing them to iterate and adapt quickly.
• The fast feedback loops and isolated environments dramatically improved Flowops’ delivery processes. Ampt facilitated the creation of preview environments, enabling the team to test changes efficiently with subsets of users and ensure a smooth transition to production.
• Flowops relied on Ampt’s built-in databases for ease of use and performance. No need to wrestle with an additional external database platform for running their young startup.
• With plans for the biggest revamp of their platform based on customer feedback, Flowops is confident in Ampt’s ability to support their growing needs. Running entirely on Ampt, they are assured of the platform's scalability and its capacity to support new use cases, especially given Ampt's native operation on AWS.

Flowops, a young startup based in Lagos, Nigeria, is a comprehensive incident monitoring and management tool designed to empower non-technical users with proactive control over their services. The platform offers a feature flag control system that allows for easy rollback of deployments, maintenance notifications of affected services and dependencies, and the ability to turn off or on specific features on the edge based on incident notifications and uptime from status pages. Korede Onamade, the founder of Flowops, has been working on this idea for years, working with different platforms like Digital Ocean and AWS Lambda for the first prototypes. But he needed a better way to accelerate the delivery of new features and iterate on feedback quickly.

Challenge: Deployment Hurdles Hammering Delivery Speed

Before transitioning to Ampt, Flowops was navigating a complex landscape of operational hurdles that significantly impeded efficiency and agility. Initially relying on servers from bare metal services, Flowops tried other platforms like Hetzner and Railway with the hope of seeking practical solutions to run a server. They pivoted to serverless functions, hoping to streamline operations while handing off the server management to cloud providers. However, this shift brought its own set of difficulties, particularly in testing and deploying separate environments for testing new ideas for their applications.

The team at Flowops sought a platform that would not only facilitate rapid development and deployment of APIs but also align with the dynamic needs of a startup environment. This need became increasingly critical as they aimed to iterate quickly and effectively on their MVP, without being bogged down by the complexities of infrastructure management or vendor reliance. It was in this context of seeking greater agility and operational simplicity that Flowops discovered Ampt, marking the beginning of their transformative journey.

Discovering Ampt

Korede Onamade, Founder of Flowops, discovered Ampt through a Google search while looking for the fastest way to develop APIs using JavaScript. Impressed by its simplicity and efficiency, particularly for a startup needing to iterate quickly, Korede chose Ampt for its integrated database solutions and pay-as-you-go model on AWS. Migrating to Ampt was seamless, with no need to rewrite their existing Express.js application, facilitating a smooth transition.

Results After Using Ampt

Since integrating Ampt, Flowops has experienced transformative changes in their development process. Remarkably, they managed to rebuild their MVP three times within six months — a feat that would typically have taken a year. This rapid development cycle is largely attributed to Ampt's fast feedback loops and isolated development sandboxes, which have significantly enhanced their local development processes. The ability to create preview environments for testing with subsets of users before full production deployment has been a game-changer, allowing for smoother and more efficient transitions.

For a young startup that tries new ideas constantly, time to market is the most important thing, and Ampt has taken Flowops there at top speed. Most importantly, Ampt didn't cost Flowops any upfront payment or fixed costs with servers thanks to its pay-as-you-go approach. The team put their focus on the customer value and saved development hours and money.

Looking Ahead - Rising on the shoulders of Ampt!

Looking forward, Flowops has ambitious plans for their platform, with the biggest revamp yet in the pipeline. Korede no longer has concerns about cloud infrastructure challenges thanks to their reliance on Ampt. Currently, Flowops runs entirely on Ampt, and Korede is confident that the platform will continue to support their growth and new use cases as they scale.