Customer Success Story: Schnaq

As a company based in Germany, we are very happy to have a European cloud provider that is GDPR compliant and offers a wide range of services at a very competitive price. Its managed services and simple interface make it easy to use and manage our own infrastructure and the infrastructure of our customers. Christian Meter, Co-Founder and CTO of Schnaq

Challenges and context

Our company develops and maintains software for our customers, e.g. SaaS web applications, AI services, IoT solutions, iOS and Android Apps, 3D Browser-Games, VR and AR applications, and more. All these projects have in common that they require a reliable and scalable infrastructure, which mostly means, that we at least need scalable kubernetes clusters for the backends, managed databases and object storage.

Our customers are often startups in their early stages or medium-sized companies, which means that they have a limited budget and need to be able to scale their infrastructure as their business grows. Predictable pricing is also very important to them, because especially early stage startups do not have a lot of money to spend on infrastructure and need to keep an eye on their costs.

Sustainable and green infrastructure is also a very important topic for us and our customers. This needs to be considered when choosing a cloud provider, even at the very beginning of a project.

Cloud Solution for Schnaq

Most projects start with a managed kubernetes cluster, the observability cockpit, object storage, managed databases and private networks. This gives a good starting point for most projects and makes it easy to scale the infrastructure.

To deploy the projects efficiently, we build docker images in our CI/CD on GitHub and push the images to the managed registry. The deployment to the kubernetes clusters is done with ArgoCD, which is set up in each cluster and automatically deploys the services when a new version is pushed to the charts repository.

To monitor the infrastructure and the applications, we use the observability cockpit, which is a managed Grafana, Loki and Prometheus stack. The data is collected via fluent-bit, which automatically sends all logs to the observability cockpit and gives us a great overview of the health of our infrastructure and applications. The pre-configured dashboards and alerts make it easy to keep an eye on everything.

Affordable managed databases make it very easy for us to keep the data of our customers safe and secure. We use managed PostgreSQL and managed MySQL databases for most projects and are very happy with the performance and the price. The automatic backups and the high-availability make it easy to scale the databases.

The managed services allow us to focus on developing the applications and not on managing the infrastructure. This is a huge advantage for us, because we are a small team and need to be as efficient as possible. Maybe this is the most important point for us, because it allows us to focus on our core business and not on managing infrastructure.

We are computer scientists and want to solve problems, not manage servers :-)

Future plans with Scaleway

For future projects, we are looking forward to use more serverless functions and serverless databases, which allow more efficient and scalable solutions for our customers. Not having to rent a whole (virtual) server for a small service is a huge advantage and can save a lot of money as well as resources.