
Case study
Sycada
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More time to focus on core business, powered by a cloud partner
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“Transitioning to the cloud involves several one-time actions, and it's hard to maintain a certain skill level if you only do things once. But because Cambrian Technologies manages the transition for a great deal of customers, their skills regarding things like network technology, platform security and best practices are top notch. Their experts didn't just offer plenty of helpful advice during the process, but actually rolled up their sleeves and got to work.”
Rogier Mulder – CTO Sycada Tweet
The customer
Sycada was founded by Kristian Winge from Greenland, who strongly believes profit and sustainability can go hand in hand. They partner with public transit companies, cab companies and maintenance services who want to decrease their carbon footprint. Smart technology like DriveTag, a fuel efficiency app developed by Sycada, saves these companies millions of gallons annually.
From their offices in Amsterdam, Munich and Athens, Sycada serves more than 1,000 enterprise customers throughout Europe. It’s absolutely vital that their customers’ applications are up and running 24/7.
The challenge
To keep up with modern developments and be ready for further growth, Sycada’s management decided to move to the cloud in 2019. They chose to go with Amazon Web Services (AWS) because that provider was the largest, and offered the widest range of technologies and market knowledge.
Although they know a lot about enterprise applications at Sycada, cloud services and Amazon were new to them. Once upon a time, the company had started out with a single server in the hallway closet that eventually moved to a data center’s server rack. In short, they were used to a world where you could buy resources and watch them run, so to speak. But when you move to the cloud, different laws apply. And because the implementation of those different laws requires different technology, they approached us to help them out.
The solution
We guided Sycada through the entire process. First, we replicated the existing platform to make it run on a virtual server. Once that was taken care of, we made the platform server-less, so Sycada could take full advantage of all the benefits working in the cloud has to offer.
That’s not all, though. To ensure that Sycada’s developers can update their software while keeping the platform up and running, we deployed small, parallel containers. This setup allows them to deploy automated software updates while the system remains available.
The results
In a nutshell: Sycada now has plenty of time to focus on their core business, since the technical side is all taken care of – everything from hardware and maintenance to power and network connectivity is under control.
Another big benefit for Sycada is the additional reliability Amazon offers. After all, the data centers are grouped into Availability Zones (AZs), which in turn are grouped into regions. Should some of the containers or services go down, the platform continues to run smoothly.
Finally, the Amazon cloud allows them to adjust costs as their usage increases. For a platform with growth ambitions and a varying server load, it’s the perfect match.