YouTeam
Project highlights
About the client
About the client
YouTeam is a leading talent-matching platform that connects employers with over 50,000 vetted candidates from 500+ top agencies in Latin America and Europe. Founded in 2014, YouTeam quickly became a global hit and surpassed $1 million in sales within two years without any external investment. It was shortly accepted by Y Combinator, an American venture fund for promising startups.
The secret behind YouTeam’s success is that it offers a safe and stress-free solution to the common problem of team scaling. Here’s how it works: the YouTeam platform features developer profiles from the software development agencies that passed YouTeam's multistep vetting process. Clients set up a quick call with one of the Matching Experts at YouTeam, build a candidate list and conduct pre-interviews to ensure the candidates perfectly fit their needs. Finally, they sign a contract with the chosen talent. YouTeam provides a 1-month free trial and candidate replacements if needed.
As their customer base grew, YouTeam faced the scalability problem. Their legacy platform's internal issues prevented it from scaling, impacting performance, time to market, and deployment speed. To solve this problem, YouTeam reached out to Flyaps for ongoing support and DevOps services.
Read on to learn how we overhauled the platform’s architecture and allowed YouTeam to evolve their platform further, taking full control of their solution.
CLIENT REQUEST
YouTeam requested DevOps and software support services from Flyaps to help them scale their platform, speed up deployment, and shorten the time to market.
Before starting the project, our team conducted a thorough DevOps assessment to identify the root cause of the problem and come up with the best strategy to tackle it. We discovered that the key issue was the chaotic infrastructure that had already reached a dead-end level and started to tamper with the development pace and time-to-market.
Another key problem was that the platform was at constant risk of data loss, as there was no backup storage or plan B in case of a system crash.
Last but not least, the company depended on a single tech expert who held the keys to their legacy software hosting, but he left the company leaving the team unable to access the infrastructure setup.
Based on our findings, we offered the client to perform a complete infrastructure overhaul and move the platform to Kubernetes and only then proceed with ongoing platform support and code improvements. They agreed to the plan and our collaboration started.
problem
To allow YouTeam to scale the platform further, we had to solve several problems:
With 11+ years of experience in deploying, automating, optimizing, and streamlining development processes for tech startups and big enterprises, we were able to fill in the gap in the client’s team and help them rebuild their infrastructure. Our cloud expertise, extensive toolset, and experience with Kubernetes made us a perfect fit for YouTeam.
approach
To solve the performance issues and allow YouTeam to scale further, we had to completely rebuild the platform’s infrastructure, move to Kubernetes, standardize configurations across all services, and replace outdated components with modern, efficient alternatives.
solution
We identified the following issues that affected the platform's performance and blocked scaling:
To help YouTeam overcome these challenges, we decided to perform a comprehensive overhaul of the whole infrastructure, rebuilding the system into a scalable and secure platform. Here are the main milestones of this journey.
In the old system hosted on Hetzner, requests often looped back, creating inefficiencies and operational headaches due to poor routing and outdated infrastructure. This caused delays and confusion, making it difficult to manage workloads effectively.
To address this, we transitioned the system to Kubernetes, a modern platform for workload management and deployment. Kubernetes offers advanced orchestration capabilities, which allowed us to streamline the deployment process, automate scaling, and improve resource management.
To tackle the routing issues, we also integrated Istio, a service mesh that provides advanced traffic management, security, and observability features. It allowed us to direct workloads to specific URLs, handle complex routing tasks, and manage multi-redirects effectively.
This combination of Kubernetes and Istio not only resolved the routing issues but also enhanced the overall efficiency and scalability of the system.
Another key issue that impacted the platform was that the stage environment was set up in a different location from the production environment.
Without similar environments, problems that don't show up in staging can cause major issues in production. This becomes especially problematic when performance issues start to affect user experience, making it hard to pinpoint the cause without a similar environment for comparison.
To solve it, we completely rebuilt both the stage and production environments, moving them to the AWS cloud and ensuring they were properly aligned, consistently configured, and optimized.
During the infrastructure assessment, we found that CloudFront was being used for routing web traffic. Since CloudFront is not designed for this purpose, we had to switch the system to an optimal cloud load balancer service and opted for AWS’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) because of its reliability, advanced traffic management capabilities, and seamless integration with other AWS services.
We also discovered that there were three ELB instances, including two Classic ELBs which are outdated and no longer supported by AWS. Outdated ELBs couldn’t handle the platform’s demands which led to slow response times and unreliable performance.
That’s why we replaced the old Classic ELBs with new, modern load balancers. This upgrade involved configuring the new load balancers to handle web traffic effectively, which improved the system’s performance and reliability. Now, the load balancers are perfectly suited to manage the traffic and support the platform.
Another challenge was that the company's blog operated separately from the main platform, making the setup complex and disorganized from an infrastructure perspective.
To achieve a streamlined and efficient system, we unified the infrastructure in 3 steps:
This approach simplified platform management, improved performance, and ensured a more reliable infrastructure for the platform.
After resolving the urgent issues, we moved on to platform support. To see any changes within the YouTeam’s platform in real-time, we integrated observability tools that allowed us to monitor all metrics on a dashboard.
The dashboard displays:
Although we are prepared for ongoing support, the infrastructure improvements have resulted in almost no notifications, which is the best sign of a stable and well-functioning system.
Together with YouTeam, we managed to fully rebuild their infrastructure, making the platform secure, reliable, and scalable. Now the company can safely grow, enhancing its services with new features and landing pages. As a result of the rebuilt infrastructure, YouTeam could successfully integrate AI capabilities for an even more transparent and unbiased vetting process. We continue to support the platform, ensuring it operates fast and smoothly.
Result
After we rebuilt the system infrastructure, YouTeam could quickly add new pages and even enhance the platform with AI features.
With streamlined DevOps workflows, we reduced deployment times, accelerated releases, and enabled YouTeam to respond quickly to market demands.
The new platform performs fast and smoothly, handling 10K+ concurrent users thanks to the robust infrastructure and streamlined configurations.
Flyaps helped us establish our DevOps infrastructure. With their guidance, we successfully launched a new environment that met our requirements for scalability, reliability, and performance. They offer great value for a reasonable price and they rapidly found and assigned suitable talents.
If your infrastructure is a mess blocking your growth, we are the right company to delegate the fixing to. We provide top-notch software engineering and DevOps expertise to help our clients get unstuck. If you're interested in collaboration, please reach out to us.
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