Concord Materials' Story of Migrating from Heroku to AWS with Flightcontrol

Executive Summary

Concord Materials used Heroku to get up and running quickly to build their startup, but the costs of keeping their projects on Heroku, plus the quality of Heroku’s support led them to look for a new cloud provider and a developer-first platform.

Introduction

Background: Concord Materials is an accounts payable tool for construction companies, focused on making the process of raw materials payments much easier for their customers’ accounting departments. The typical construction process involves lots of paper receipts being collected at the plant, and Concord Materials provides a machine-learning based digitization and reconciliation solution that makes the jobs of accounts payable clerks much better.

Objective: Because Concord Materials went through Y Combinator, they used Heroku credits to get the product up and ready. After using the credits, the costs of using Heroku led them to looking for a new solution.

The Challenge

Profile: All of Concord Materials’ code is running on the cloud - the stack is a Ruby on Rails back end with a React front end. In addition to the web application, several Sidekiq jobs run asynchronously on demand for processing construction invoices. Files get stored on Amazon S3 as part of the processing.

Pain Points: Heroku Support wasn’t able to dive in and help when there were problems, leaving Concord Materials to work the way through solutions on their own. The support at Heroku also wasn’t very accessible.

The Decision-Making Process

Criteria: Concord Materials wanted a lower cost solution with the option of higher-touch, hands on DevOps support.

Why Flightcontrol: Flightcontrol’s support and desire for customer success stood out. The CEO and CTO of Flightcontrol committed to getting Concord Materials deployed on the platform, working hands-on to solve deployment issues with the initial setup.

The Implementation

Custom Solutions: Because Concord Materials uses Ruby on Rails, the CTO of Flightcontrol made it his personal goal to make sure that the Nixpacks build process Flightcontrol uses was as fast as possible for Rails deployments, speeding up the builds by 80%.

Collaboration: Flightcontrol was a true partner to Concord Materials during this migration process. Brandon (CEO of Flightcontrol) made it clear that any DevOps issues that occurred would have Flightcontrol’s full assistance for support.

The Support

Shared Slack/Discord Channel: Flightcontrol provided direct team access via Slack / Discord. This was really helpful to solve issues quickly.

Asynchronous Support: Because Concord Materials and Flightcontrol shared a common Slack channel, updates could be left for either team, no matter what time zone team members are in.

The Results

Immediate Benefits: Concord Materials was able to keep the same “git push” deployment workflow they used with Heroku.

Long-Term Impact: As Concord Materials keeps adding customers in the construction industry with their innovative solutions, the company can continue to scale up their operations without hiring a DevOps engineer or team.

Quantitative Metrics: ”We’re [at] 30% of the total cost that we would've been on Heroku, so 70% savings was pretty great.” - Anthony Valente, CEO of Concord Materials