Positional had been in private beta for a year where their app load was pretty predictable. They knew how many more customers they were onboarding at a time, so they understood the capacity required. That meant, “We didn't invest a ton of time thinking through scalability,” Lenhard said.  

As they geared up for public launch, “All of that goes out the window very quickly.” 

They also had an eye toward a future product launch that involved ingesting a lot of customer data, so they expected more load spikes that would impact their availability. At that point, they needed to start taking their infrastructure scalability and availability more seriously.

When Lenhard started to look for options to address his challenges, he connected with the StormForge team and got a crash course in Kubernetes optimization best practices.  They helped him envision what the ideal setup would be like, helping him understand what would meet his needs that wouldn't “take forever to get to.” 

With this knowledge, he understood how to “balance the benefits of the availability [with] the cost optimization, alongside not spending too many resources on getting all of this set up. Which, for a small team like us, is super important.”

That led him to use Karpenter alongside Stormforge. 

“There's kind of the missing piece in between Karpenter and your workloads, which is, ‘how do you set up these requests and limits for your deployments?’ That was a hard question for us because we didn't really know. I mean, you could pipe everything into a Grafana dashboard and stare at it for a while and try to think, okay, ‘Here's our 99 percentile of CPU. And this is what costs will look like.” 

“StormForge basically handled all that for us.” 

He realized that, “I can save myself a bunch of time, and we can wrap up everything we need on the infrastructure side quicker so that we can get back to focusing on products and the things that are actually going to drive value for our customers, and ultimately us.”

“The cool thing about Stormforge is it basically just did all this for me, gave me this nice little patch file, and that's it. I can just hit apply, and it's off to the races.”

“It just really made it easy to handle both sides of things — the workload sizing and then [with Karpenter] the node scaling as well.”

“It used to be more of a balancing act between [cost and availability], but with Karpenter and StormForge, it's less of that because you kind of get the best of both worlds where you can stay online, stay available, without worrying about too much about unused or over-provisioned resources that are going to eat up your AWS bill.”