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Customer Story

WeTransfer: Creating the DevOps flow

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Related services
DevOps Consulting

Industry
Business and IT

Company
Xebia

Xebia helped WeTransfer scale to the organizational growth and overcame technical depth by working the DevOps way.

In 2009, Dutchman, Bas Beeren, introduced WeTransfer to the world. The platform offers a straightforward way to share large files quickly with people across the world— up to 2GB for free. The company grew rapidly in one decade. In 2018, WeTransfer had 45 million monthly active users, from over 190 countries worldwide, who shared a staggering 1 billion files every month.
Why
Support rocketing growth and simplify innovation
What
Update infrastructure and implement Agile and DevOps
How
Improve workflow with a self-service platform and product teams using Kanban and Scrum

Keeping Up With Growth

WeTransfer’s file platform team was challenged by
its ever-increasing growth rate. Despite leaving the start-up phase, the team was still responsible for all operations, instrumentation, and infrastructure. Doing everything meant the team couldn’t keep up, which created a bottleneck in the organization. To realize further expansion, WeTransfer asked Xebia to help increase the capacity of its platform and make it easier to offer new products and services.

Towards Agile, DevOps and PaaS

WeTransfer hired Xebia to assist in creating an Agile organization. Operations, instrumentation, and infrastructure needed a revamp to create a broader foundation for flexible growth.

While Xebia’s work at WeTransfer started as an infrastructure coaching assignment, it soon expanded into a full DevOps organizational shift using technologies like Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes on AWS and Go with CLI tools, together with Scrum and Kanban methods.
In eight months, Xebia helped the operations team develop into a highly productive product team that now offers a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to other product teams.

“Our mantra is to keep people in their flow. When we realized our two-person Ops team was in reactive mode, we asked Xebia to help bring back the flow. They enabled us to attain technical excellence by establishing iterative processes, combining Kanban and Scrum, to accomplish the right flow.”

wetransfer logo
Martijn Vermaat VP engineering, WeTransfer

A Tech Infrastructure Overhaul That Takes WeTransfer and Its Customers Forward

“Xebia created a self-service infrastructure to remove the bottleneck. Now our developers can now create new infrastructure as part of their application development process, which speeds up production,” said Vermaat. A strict separation of configuration and infrastructure as code made it possible to create large numbers of new dev/test environments on the fly and to spin up integration environments in CI/CD.

“Xebia’s tech changes transformed our operational team into a rockstar product team,” Vermaat said. WeTransfer now has a workable and adjustable flow tailored to its needs and its customers’ needs. A single rotating ‘Ops-of-the-day’ now handles all daily operations.

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