Customer Success Story : LittleBig Connection

LittleBig Connection is a SaaS platform that helps clients and experts connect with their partners and manage their collaborations with a complete platform from sourcing, to project management and billing.

After a +5,000% growth in 2018, this startup stands out once again in 2021 by being nominated in the Décideurs Magazine’s top 500 European growth leaders. Now, Little BIG Connection has a community of 350,000 experts and over 250 client companies across 16 countries.

Little BIG Connection chooses a sovereign cloud for its platform and clients

In 2015, Little BIG Connection deployed the first version of its platform. Back then, the startup already used Scaleway’s Dedibox servers.There was only one option they were willing to consider – working with a European, and more specifically French, provider. This is actually a prerequisite for some of its clients, who require that their data be hosted by a sovereign provider.

After their period of hypergrowth in 2018, Little BIG Connection faced new scalability challenges and decided to consider various cloud providers – in this case Azure and Scaleway. Scaleway’s prices, transparency (clear information, no hidden costs), and proximity of its expert support team convinced the startup to continue its adventure with Scaleway as its cloud provider.

Despite a smaller catalog of solutions than Azure’s, Little BIG Connection decided to bet on Scaleway’s experts to help build an infrastructure that meets their every need. Quite the winning team!

Conquering Kubernetes to build scalable architecture

Processing images rapidly means high CPU usage, and as demand kept growing, Little BIG Connection was facing issues regarding memory design and size. The startup opted for horizontal rather than vertical scaling, and added servers with dedicated CPUs via Instances. Scaleway’s offer is based on AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series processors, which guarantee high-end performance with long-term stability.

It then became strategic for Little BIG Connection’s tech teams to learn to use Kubernetes, so that they could manage containerization and improve their CI/CD.

Nowadays, their main architecture consists of:

• Terraform, to structure their entire technical stack
• Gitlab, to instantiate sources
• Kapsule (Scaleway’s managed Kubernetes solution), which allows containerized applications to be run in a managed K8s environment via the Console
  
  This scalable infrastructure means that Little BIG Connection can sit back and plan the upcoming migration to Scaleway for the hosting of their Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects.
  
  

More than a client/provider relationship, a win-win partnership

“We were not looking for the perfect solution, we were looking for the perfect partnership.”

In just a few words, Eric Tinoco – CIO at LittleBig Connection sums up the ambition that guided them in their choice of cloud provider.

Thanks to the support, the dedicated Solutions Architects, and the Community Slack, the startup found a perfect partner in Scaleway to help them with their day-to-day challenges. This technological partnership enables both companies to build an ecosystem that benefits both.