MDDV is a unique team of IT experts who provide management, support, consulting and IT security services (including security audits) to over 500 companies and institutions across the global market. In particular, they specialise in building sophisticated IT infrastructures for software houses and eCommerce businesses, and workwith multiple customers from the financial and legal sectors.
Since 2005, MDDV founders Mariusz Dalewski and Paweł Ufnalewski have been using OVHcloud solutions to deploy environments for their customers. Throughout this time, they have gone on to become an essential partner for OVHcloud.
The organisation’s strength lies in its employees, teamwork and comprehensive approach to each project. In their customer approach, MDDV focuses on three key values: direct contact with an administrator (excluding the first line of support), bespoke IT solutions and building partnerships with customers. During deployments, the company’s highly qualified employees join the project teams and work hand-in-hand with the customer’s developers, not only supporting the infrastructure design,but also giving advice on the application architecture.
Focused on delivering a cost-effective environment, MDDV deploys solutions based on OVHcloud Dedicated Servers and Public Cloud instances that respond to the needs of their customers. Providing low maintenance costs, those solutions offer also better performance, high availability and full redundancy.
Mariusz Dalewski, CEO, and Paweł Ufnalewski, CTO of MDDV, shared with us how they help their customers to achieve tangible cost savings and why they favour a hybrid infrastructure.
The challenge
Working closely with software houses – such as 10Clouds, Retailic or Monterail – MDDV became familiar with the needs and concerns of these organisations.
The wide variety of cloud computing services available on the market makes it possible for development teams to choose their resources from PaaS (Platform as a Service) or FaaS (Function as a Service) solutions and easily integrate the software with their own. However, they often encounter a number of pitfalls, including unexpectedly high costs of cloud platforms, low performance, and insufficient security measures. MDDV helps these customers optimise and protect their environments by migrating applications (contrary to the cloud-first trend) from out-of-the-box cloud platforms to custom-made infrastructures.
Through years of close collaboration, MDDV have developed a deep technical understanding of OVHcloud products and tools. This allows them to provide effective customer support and managed infrastructures, installed on the full range of cutting-edge technologies and innovations provided by OVHcloud.
The solution
MDDV data shows that about 40% of the migrations they carry out for customers involve moving resources from cloud services to hybrid solutions, combining Dedicated Servers and the Public Cloud.
“Software houses expect highly scalable solutions that is why they are eager to reach for the cloud. However, as resources are used, costs are also rising very rapidly, often exceeding the pain threshold of the business. There’s the place for us. We optimise costs pragmatically, while maintaining stability and flexibility.”
Mariusz Dalewski, CEO of MDDV
Software houses, accustomed to Amazon’s AWS, Google or Microsoft solutions, expect ready-made solutions, resources on-demand and automation of processes. If a deployed application is successful, the resource demand suddenly increases, so a hybrid cloud solution must offer an automatic mechanism to scale the infrastructure easily and rapidly. MDDV has developed its own autoscaler, which can add OVH Public Cloud instances, using the API interface, and protect applications from overload.
Each environment that MDDV designs for a customer is unique. However, there are several key elements applicable to them all that ensure reliability and scalability. A basic high-availability cluster consists of two load balancers, at least two application servers and two database servers. This way, if one element fails, there is at least one redundant server in the infrastructure, ready to take over.
MDDV deploys Dedicated Servers and Public Cloud instances, connected to a secure, private network. Servers with load balancing software are used to evenly distribute http(s) and TCP traffic between the application servers. Based on the traffic data collected from the back-end and front-end servers by the load balancers, the autoscaler threshold values are established. When the defined thresholds are reached, the autoscaler adds or removes additional resources from the infrastructure.
With Public Cloud templates, it is quick and easy to spawn multiple instances at the same time. The OVHcloud API interface enables fast service delivery, through an automated order process and direct activation of resources by the autoscaler. Thanks to the simple hourly billing system, the costs remain under control and customers only pay for what they really use.
But MDDV’s experts don’t stop at a successful code implementation. After an application is launched in the hybrid cloud, a series of performance tests are run. This way, the customer is assured that the recommended resources meet their expectations, and the infrastructure is fully optimised for their requirements.
The result
“Moving away from the serverless platform has allowed one of our clients to reduce monthly infrastructure costs from $20,000 to $8,000. We architect a more efficient and secure alternative to cloud-based services with OVHcloud Dedicated Servers. The key is to work closely with the customer’s team and select the best hardware.”
Mariusz Dalewski, CEO of MDDV
The security and redundancy dimension is often overlooked by development teams who manage IT resources on their own. MDDV assists those teams in maintaining the high availability of their infrastructures, as well as the associated applications. High-availability clusters, designed and operated by MDDV’s employees, provide secure resources for software houses in a closed environment.
Enhanced with the autoscaler and API automation, the MDDV’s infrastructure represents a true hybrid cloud, seamlessly connecting Dedicated Servers and Public Cloud instances. The instances are launched on-demand and offered with a simple hourly billing system, helping to keep IT budgets under control while providing additional scalable resources.
The extensive range of OVHcloud solutions allows MDDV to choose from hundreds of server configurations and match them with specific needs. Always keeping resilience in mind, MDDV prefers to choose acclaimed hardware, such as the HG servers, equipped with hot swap modules that allow faulty drives to be replaced while the server is running.
The basic hybrid cloud cluster – initially designed for software companies – is a universal solution, suitable for numerous use cases. MDDV successfully deploys it for e-commerce businesses, offering them additional resources for short-term projects, such as Black Friday.
As an OVHcloud partner, MDDV manages OVHcloud customers’ servers, offering them added value in the form of ready-to-use, managed infrastructures, with expert support during and after the migration. This collaboration between OVHcloud and MDDV extends to other activities. In addition to offering mutual support during tech events and webinars, OVHcloud supports the SysOps/DevOps Polska community, established by Mariusz and Paweł, as well as sponsoring community meetups in major Polish cities.
“Our customers are highly price-sensitive. But our goal is to offer them a quality solution. That’s why we recommend OVHcloud products, which offer outstanding performance-to-price ratio.”
