Case Study

Supporting Malt’s ambitious growth with immediate 6% savings

Client
malt logo
Malt
Industries

Technologies
BigQuery, Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine, Looker
Region
EMEA, South EMEA
Country
France

Meet Malt

Working with DoiT is helping Malt to move quickly and optimize their cloud usage

The workplace is changing fast, and it’s not just about remote working: The pandemic has also accelerated the shift to freelancing. The number of freelancers in the French digital sector alone has grown by 92% in the past decade. Many new freelancers are looking for new ways of networking, connecting and finding their next project. Digital marketplace Malt helps them to do just that, bringing together 300,000 freelancers and 40,000 businesses. 

The challenge

Malt uses AI to analyze business requirements and recommend the best freelance candidates for roles. In 2019, Malt migrated its search and recommendation engine infrastructure and its data pipeline to Google Cloud, so that it could scale its services to a growing user base. As part of the migration, it containerized its applications using Docker and orchestrated its containers with Google Kubernetes Engine. The goal? To create a more flexible, scalable infrastructure to support its expanding client base.

“To move forward, we needed tools that enable our growing development team, and work in an agile, autonomous way,” says Hugo Lassiège. “We chose Google Cloud as we wanted to delegate our infrastructure management as much as possible while maintaining and raising our security standards and scalability.”

Supporting ambitious plans for growth

Since then, the company has expanded significantly. It now operates in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and it has ambitious plans to expand to ten countries by 2024. To support Malt through the next stage of its growth, Google Cloud introduced the team to DoiT International.

“Strategically, when a company is looking to expand, it’s important to make every aspect of the business as efficient as possible,” says Hugo Lassiège. “That’s what we’re planning to achieve through our partnership with Google Cloud and DoiT International.”

The solution

Simply by contracting its services through DoiT as a reseller, Malt immediately saved on its Google Cloud usage. “After agreeing on our commitment plan, we switched over the billing for our Google Cloud services, as well as for associated Google Marketplace services, such as Fivetran and Mongo,” says Hugo Lassiège.

“We worked together with DoiT to transition smoothly and immediately benefited from a 6% reduction in our costs.”

Using DoiT’s unique cost management technology, Malt can access a more granular overview of its costs and spending. This includes breaking down spending by department or team, which helps Malt to identify areas where further cost optimization is possible.

Supporting scaling with technical insights

DoiT’s expertise in working with Google Cloud is also supporting Malt’s planned expansion by providing insights into best practices for infrastructure automation. Thanks to DoiT’s dedicated support services, Malt can turn to DoiT for a quick response to any questions on its Google Cloud infrastructure.

“We’ve only been with DoiT for six months, but we’ve already had a number of exchanges that inspire confidence in their support services,” says Hugo Lassiège. “For example, they’ve provided advice on using Preemptible VM instances as Nodes in Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as troubleshooting autoscaling queries. As both our application and data infrastructure run on Google Kubernetes Engine, that was really helpful.”

The result

Optimizing costs by billing Google Cloud services with DoiT frees more money for Malt to invest in its development teams. “For a business like ours, which is growing extremely rapidly, our investment goes principally into people,” says Hugo Lassiege. “We’re reinvesting the cost savings we’re making on infrastructure, thanks to DoiT, into our teams.”

What's next title

Simplifying further and scaling up
The next step for Malt is to start making the most of the optimization tools DoiT offers. The additional scalability Malt is gaining through its best-practice usage of Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine will also support its growth in the coming years. “It’s a few years away, but Malt’s expansion beyond Europe is on the horizon, and it’s reassuring to know we’ll be able to scale easily when the time comes,” says Hugo Lassiège.

Hugo Lassiège, Co-fondateur, CTO, Malt
“What’s great about DoiT is their deep understanding of Google Cloud, and the fact that they understand the whole ecosystem of services, including Google Marketplace,” he concludes. “We have two short-term goals: Firstly, we want to improve our CI infrastructure, which we will do by migrating from hosted Bamboo to GitLab CI and our own Google Kubernetes Engine and, secondly, we want to migrate to Looker.

Our key goal, however, is to move quickly and do what we need to simplify as much as possible. The work we are doing in the cloud with DoiT’s support is what will enable us to do that.”

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