Customer Interview: KwiqJobs

2017-09-11 by Axel Fontaine

Today we are kicking off a series of interview where CloudCaptain customers talk about their experiences. In this first interview I chatted with Jannes Stubbemann, the CTO of KwiqJobs.

KwiqJobs Team

Hi Jannes, can you tell us about yourself and your company?

KwiqJobs wants to turn the waiting time of people into a new resource. We are building a mobile marketplace for microjobs that allows companies to gather data from our app users by placing jobs on our platform. These jobs vary from market research questionnaires to tasks in which users label or generate data that later can be used to train an artificial intelligence. For doing these jobs, which take a few seconds only, the users earn a few amount of money. My position is the one of the CTO. I am a proud co-founder of KwiqJobs and joined the team on a startup weekend in June last year. Currently we are about to close our seed investment and are building our developer team in a remote setup.

That sounds great! What does your infrastructure setup look like?

Our product as such consists of two main pieces, the mobile application (for now only Android) and a Scala/Play Application as the backend. The backend is currently hosted in AWS where it gets deployed by CloudCaptain. As our version control system we are using git in combination with GitLab to organize our work and our continuous delivery pipelines. As we are working in a remote setup, we use slack as our main communication tool. It helps us not only to communicate with each other but also to get notified about app crashes via crashlytics or deployments from GitLab.

Why did you choose CloudCaptain?

I think one of the key success factors of good software development is a good and easy to manage continuous delivery pipeline. As a startup we don’t have the capabilities to set it all up using e.g. Docker. Instead, we where looking for a managed solution that allowed us to have a working cd pipeline from the very beginning. When we where looking for such a solution we found CloudCaptain. It seemed really well suited and so far it hasn’t disappointed us. There is no need for us to care about the AWS environment as such and we can focus on the development of our platform instead.

Can you tell us a bit more on how you are using CloudCaptain and what your favorite feature is?

We use CloudCaptain for our continuous delivery of the backend. Whenever code is merged into our develop or master branch, GitLab ci is running CloudCaptain in order to deploy the application in our test or production environment on AWS. My favorite feature is that with CloudCaptain we have one central program, even more one single command, to manage multiple things around our application. For instance we didn’t need to integrate New Relic by hand, CloudCaptain has first level support for that already! We just needed to include it in the command. Or the logs which are also set up by CloudCaptain and can even be accessed via it. This helps us to focus on the development of our application. We don’t get distracted by caring how to setup New Relic or accessing our EC2 instances to change some settings. It’s so many things in one place and easy to use which make it a really powerful tool particular for startups.

After we built our mvp and onboarded our first customer in the last year, it is our goal this year to build a scalable application and onboard more customers that we have already in our pipeline.

Thanks!