SMSO Case Study

Consolidates their infrastructure and achieves 99.99% uptime with DevOps-As-a-Service

SMSO Overcame Their Software Development and Deployment Challenges by Leveraging Bunnyshell's Expertise and Infrastructure Management Capabilities

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COMPANY

SMSO is a Communication Platform as a Service which helps companies communicate with their customers via SMS through a modern and intuitive web platform or completely automatically through an easy-to-integrate API.

HEADQUARTERS

Bucharest, Romania

FOUNDED

2016

TEAM SIZE

10 Software Engineers

Challenge

Back in 2020, as their product was gaining traction, the biggest problem the SMSO founding team was facing was lack of control and predictability over their software development and release for their platform. The founding team had  significant experience and expertise in the telecommunication industry, but limited experience in building and shipping software. Without a dedicated ops team, the founders were over-relying on a small software development team to both build and deploy the software, but also to manage the infrastructure and production environments.

This was causing lots of friction as software developers were reluctant to take ownership of production environments, releases were happening ad-hoc (business owners had at times no choice but to wait for the dev team to do deployments to production).

Furthermore, scaling the infrastructure to meet peeks in demand was not possible and reliability was less than desired.

Lack of structured process and clear responsibilities was causing technical problems for the platform on the technical side, but also much stress and frustration on the business side.

Technically, our platform was not on par with our expectations, and we were feeling somewhat lost and powerless in relation to our developers.

Catalin Sporis, CEO

Solution

BlackFriday 2020 made it clear to Catalin (one of the founders of SMSO) that the team needed help with releasing to and managing production environments. He reached out to the Bunnyshell team for urgent audit and fixes, and this turned into a long term collaboration.

The audit identified several factors affecting the performance, reliability and scalability of the SMSO platform and also recommended specific architecture improvements. Over the coming weeks Bunnyshell engineers helped SMSO recreate their infrastructure in AWS using the Bunnyshell CloudManager platform.

For us, as founders, the Bunnyshell's value proposition was "not being the prisoners of our developers". I wanted us to be in control of our software pipelines, infrastructure and environments.

We have been in control of our software and infrastructure ever since we adopted Bunnyshell.

Catalin Sporis, CEO

Results

Managing infrastructure and environments with Bunnyshell CloudManager brought the expected benefits but also extra ones.

As expected of a communications platform, service uptime has been in the 99.999% range since the migration

A software development process is now in place, with dev, staging and production environments, reliable deployment pipelines give the confidence to release new software any time needed.

As an added benefit, the SMSO team now has a centralized view of their software infrastructure, with integrated monitoring and logging, allowing proactive actions and easy troubleshooting.

The infrastructure is now able to (auto)scale to meet peaks in traffic and BlackFriday campaigns are not problematic anymore.

Also, Bunnyshell engineers provide 24/7 support, premium support over dedicated Slack channels and act as trusted advisors when called upon.

But, as Catalin puts it, the highest order benefit for him and the founding team is the peace of mind that comes with knowing the technical aspects of their business are well under control and that they can focus their efforts and attention on growing the company.

The comfort Bunnyshell gives me (and my co-founders) is priceless. I know we can count on an integrated platform for managing our infrastructure and we rely on the support and knowhow of the Bunnyshell engineering team. This gives us access to capabilities and expertise the we do not have in house, at a fraction of the cost of having it in house.

Catalin Sporis, CEO

We will be counting on Bunnyshell to run our infrastructure and deployments for the foreseeable future because this gives us the confidence and peace of mind to focus on growing our business.

We are also considering extending our cooperation by adopting the Bunnyshell (Kubernetes based) Environments platform to provide us dev, staging and preview environments on our hybrid (cloud - on premise ) infrastructure.

Catalin Sporis, CEO

Frequently asked questions

Everything you need to know about the product and billing.

What is Environments as a Service (EaaS)?
Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) is a cloud platform that automatically creates and manages complete application environments on-demand. Unlike traditional infrastructure management, EaaS combines your application code with its entire runtime environment - databases, APIs, configurations, and dependencies - under unified version control. When you make code changes, EaaS automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure and configures everything your application needs to run, eliminating manual environment setup and ensuring consistency between development, testing, and production environments.
What is an Ephemeral Environment?
Ephemeral environments are temporary, isolated testing environments that are created automatically for each pull request and destroyed when no longer needed. Unlike permanent staging environments that are shared and constantly overwritten, ephemeral environments give each feature its own dedicated space for testing, previewing, and validation. They typically last for the duration of a pull request lifecycle - from creation to merge - ensuring every code change gets tested in isolation without conflicts or waiting times.
What are the benefits of EaaS?
Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) accelerates development by eliminating testing bottlenecks and reducing rework. Teams can spin up production-like environments instantly for every pull request, enabling parallel development where multiple features are tested simultaneously without conflicts. This eliminates waiting times for shared staging environments, catches integration bugs before production, and allows stakeholders to review features immediately through live preview links, ultimately resulting in faster, higher-quality deployments.
Is Bunnyshell SOC 2 Compliant?
Bunnyshell has successfully achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance and ISO 27001 certification, confirming that our systems and processes meet the rigorous international standards for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy required by enterprise and regulated industries.
How to integrate Bunnyshell with common CI/CD and DevOps tools?
Bunnyshell includes an extensive REST API, a CLI tool, Github Actions, and a Go SDK to integrate with your existing CI/CD and DevOps tools enabling you to easily deploy environments directly from your own release pipeline
Do I have to pay for a POC?
No. We offer a no-cost POC to allow you to test and assess the functionalities and benefits of our product. This period gives you the opportunity to make an informed decision without any upfront investment.
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