How Silq uses Opta to Manage Infrastructure and Improve App Performance.

Learn how the engineering team at Silq uses Opta to solve their infrastructure needs while saving team and money!

The Silq Vision

The San Francisco-based startup Silq recently raised over $17m and seeks to bring visibility and real-time data from the manufacturing floor to brands. Its technology helps users source, make and ship apparel, footwear, home goods, and accessory brands globally.

Paired with Silq’s proprietary technology platform, brands can accelerate speed-to-market and improve product quality. Customers include direct-to-consumer (DTC) and wholesale fashion and apparel brands such as Barry’s, Mightly, Mizzen+Main, and Lambert and design and production houses such as Pinpoint Merchandising and Stars Design Group.

In the Beginning...

Silq has always been mindful of its resources. For example, when they were still building the v1 of their product in the early days, the team decided to use a cloud provider that minimized setup overhead at the cost of infrastructure flexibility (Heroku). One of the Software engineers at Silq, Jack Tregurtha, said this compromise made good sense at the time as iterating the product offering was more critical than building out their infrastructure.

“Infrastructure is super important for efficiency, the engineers at Silq all agree with me, nobody loves a slow product. “ — Jack

Bottlenecks with Real Business Impact

Now that the product has attained a good level of stability, the priority has begun to shift towards a more efficient, secure, and sustainable infrastructure. The first big infrastructure problem was migrating the Silq infrastructure from Heroku to AWS. Silq’s global user base was a big motivation for this, which requires a more sophisticated infrastructure to serve effectively and efficiently — specifically, the apps need to run in global regions like India — which Heroku doesn’t provide.

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These bottlenecks had a real business impact. For example, Jack recalls that the Silq on-site experts and network of inspectors throughout Asia, who use Silq to digitize critical customer supply chain data, were experiencing poor application performance. Although these on-site experts and inspectors were internal clients and understood performance was a work in progress, Jack and his team ultimately knew that if the operations teammates did not love the workflow, Silq provided for them, it would be a risk to the business.

They say there’s no free lunch, but with Opta the lunch sure is cheap and fully supported which explains one of the motivations for migrating our infrastructure.

Opta to the Rescue

Opta dramatically simplifies deploying to a more customizable cloud provider (e.g., AWS). In addition, Opta's architecture is more secure than most engineers would know how to build on their own, let alone maintain and monitor without extensive leg work.

Given our emergent infrastructure-related performance issues, the high bar of efficiently serving a global user base, and the complexity of implementing and supporting such a system balanced with our engineering resources, Opta was a natural choice for our infrastructure team.

What is Opta?

Opta is a new kind of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) framework built on top of Terraform that lets engineers work with high-level constructs instead of getting lost in the low-level cloud configuration. Opta has a vast library of modules (like EKS, RDS, DynamoDB, GKE, Cloud SQL, and even third-party services like Datadog) that engineers can compose together to build their ideal infrastructure stack.

Jack says Opta provides a hard-to-beat level of abstraction for teams with advanced infrastructure needs and without a team of dedicated infrastructure engineers.

The team at RunX is extremely responsive to support and feature requests. Given the pace at which they’ve been able to respond to such requests, I have no doubt Opta will continue to improve their feature set while maintaining reliability and stability.

Benefits of Opta

Opta helped solve Silq’s significant infrastructure challenges in a few ways. First, simplifying the infrastructure deployment accelerated their migration from AWS to Heroku. Additionally, their architecture improved from a scalability and security perspective by using Opta. Finally, because Opta integrates with some of AWS’s global infrastructure features, they could improve performance globally with minimal effort.

So far, Opta has been a significant time-saver for Silq engineers focused on infrastructure, freeing them up to contribute to other product areas. For an organization that is growing and iterating quickly with limited resources, the value of saving time compounds and ultimately moves the needle on how well they can serve their customers.

I would recommend Opta without hesitation, especially for companies that are too large to cut corners on infrastructure, but too small to support a team of dedicated infrastructure engineers.

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