About the company
Merixstudio is a software company operating for over 20 years, whose mission is to turn ideas into high-quality digital products. The company’s team is made up of top-class specialists who solve business challenges for their clients. The vast majority of their customers come from international markets, including: the USA, the UK, Western Europe, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia.
Over the years Merixstudio supported many startups, building their products from scratch. Today, the main interest of the Poznań-based software firm is servicing larger organizations and mature companies. The team focuses on implementing innovations and scaling existing solutions. For this purpose it uses, among others, Google Cloud tools.
We are always keenly interested in our clients’ goals. It is very important to understand what problem our software should solve. That’s why we devote a lot of time to analyzing customer needs. We often organize workshops – both offline and online. We want to not only provide the code, but also explain to the client what to expect in the future and how to scale the product as the company grows.
Challenge
Merixstudio always tries to delve deep into the client’s business and understand the real need its product should satisfy. As the firm’s employees emphasize, when developing any application – whether mobile or web – they mainly think about the end user. The product they create must be as functional as possible.
This approach often faces a limited budget the client wants to spend on implementing a solution. The role of Merixstudio is to advise on which technological solutions the client should select and how to use them in the most effective way possible.
This is where cloud solutions, such as Google Cloud, come in handy. You don’t have to invest much in the beginning and you can scale up the resources you use extremely easily.
Solution
As the company developed, Merixstudio implemented Google Cloud solutions in their own business. The firm moved all internal websites to the cloud, and then began to offer the same solutions to its clients.
At the initial stage of building any digital business, Google Cloud provides flexibility and a relatively low entry level. It offers ready-made solutions that allow you to easily build your product. The cost is also relatively low and can be easily scaled with product development. In fact, this is the essence of the cloud.
Today, all of the company’s products are embedded in the cloud. Google Cloud makes it easier for Merixstudio engineers to create tailor-made solutions.
Google Cloud tools can be compared to a set of blocks, in which each block is responsible for a specific thing. When creating applications, you can, for example, use the block responsible for databases and storage. Google Cloud provides tools that, when put together by qualified people, create an infrastructure for an app to run on. It is also easy to scale depending on what services we want to provide and for how many users.
Merixstudio moved not only the app building infrastructure, but also the apps used by employees in everyday office work. FOTC helped implement the cloud tools and migrate employee accounts (including company email) to Google Workspace. The company has been using cloud tools for years now.
I contacted FOTC support many times and each time the matter was resolved in one, sometimes three emails. I send a brief description of the problem, get a case number and a response from the assigned FOTC employee, followed by resolution of the problem.
Results
Today, Merixstudio uses many Google Cloud tools to create digital products. The most important of them is Kubernetes, which the company uses to manage its infrastructure. The next elements are: databases and storage – used for backups, storing files and application components. Simple configuration of Google Cloud tools significantly speeds up the work of the technical team.
Merixstudio also uses serverless infrastructure, such as Cloud Functions, with much higher limits than in the analogous solution offered by the AWS cloud (Lambda).
Both mobile and web applications are created using Docker, which enables containerization. Then Cloud Run launches a specific container in the serverless infrastructure. This eliminates a number of DevOps responsibilities as well as problems that existed before.
Before the created applications reach the production server, i.e. the end user, they go through a test environment. It used to be done manually – the necessary files were copied to the appropriate server. Currently, the company uses pipelines, for example Merixstudio uses Kubernetes, which is responsible for the test environment in the company. All changes introduced by the developer go to the cloud and are built there on the server. This is done in such a way to allow testers to conveniently verify the quality of the code.
Google Cloud is suitable for prototyping ideas because it consists of many elements that we can put together and control. We have control over what specific services we need at any given moment. We don’t have to buy something right away to keep in stock. If we have more users, we can scale specific services, not the entire machine, as is the case with on-premise solutions. I can’t imagine a situation where we don’t use the cloud.
Other solutions used by Merixstudio specialists include: Firebase (used in mobile applications for authentication) and Flutter. The latter is a Google tool which allows to create mobile apps and works very well with Firebase. By combining the capabilities of both solutions, end users can log in to the application using Google, Facebook or other systems in the web and mobile apps.
Access management
Merixstudio engineers also emphasize that thanks to Google Cloud they have many access management options. The company’s team consists of over 200 people, so it needs these solutions to maintain appropriate control over the processed data.
We can give specific people access to specific services and have control over it. The question always arises, is the cloud service secure? It will be safe as long as we know how to configure a specific cloud. This is where Google Cloud’s internal security measures come in handy – in many cases they inform us that, for example, we are giving too many permissions or that a given setting should be configured in a different way.
Budgeting and cost control
Google Cloud also provides a number of tools for budget control. You can set alerts here that will notify you that your budget will soon be exceeded. A tool that I often use is cost prediction. This solution means that after making some changes, we can make sure they will not result in increased expenses next month.
Google Workspace
As in many companies, the pandemic has also changed the way of work at Merixstudio. Many team members now perform their duties remotely. Google Workspace tools ensured that the sudden change in the way of working from on-site to remote did not negatively affect the quality of work or the well-being of individual team members. Employees were constantly in contact with each other, including through Meet.
Google Workspace tools are very user-friendly. There are months when a lot of people join us, some of whom have never worked in this system before. New people have no problem adapting to new tools. After a short introduction by our IT support, they are able to quickly switch to new programs. The interfaces of individual applications are friendly and functional, making navigating e-mail, documents or calendar very simple and intuitive. This makes everyday work much easier.
People managing the Google Workspace instance in Merixstudio value the wide possibilities of administering both user accounts and configuring the settings of individual applications. This ensures comfortable work and a high level of safety.
We can find many things in the console ourselves. And if we have a problem with something, we contact FOTC support, which immediately responds to our queries.