Supporting Enterprise SaaS Demand with Dedicated Kubernetes-Based Web Hosting

amazee.io provides dedicated Kubernetes-based hosting for Smartsheet's Drupal website

Intending to gain faster support and optimize hosting expenses, Smartsheet engaged amazee.io to migrate their Drupal websites from their previous hosting provider to our Lagoon hosting platform. Smartsheet, a collaborative platform for dynamic work, is used by over 90% of the Fortune 100 and by companies in 190 countries. Smartsheet is built to break down barriers, empower people to work dynamically, and achieve more than they thought was possible. Regarding engagement, Alexa ranks smartsheet.com in the top .004% of sites worldwide. As such, it receives massive amounts of traffic and transfers large amounts of data and requests.

At a glance:

  • 21GB per hour of data transfer
  • 330k requests per hour
  • 15-minute response SLA
  • Autoscaling by 4x so far

amazee.io supports 17 different Smartsheet developers across multiple time zones who deploy daily via Lagoon onto the underlying AWS infrastructure. When questions arise—big or small—amazee.io responds directly in Smartsheet’s private Slack channel—usually within minutes.

Smartsheet Software Development Manager Corné de Leeuw says, "Our experience with amazee.io has been exceptional so far. Since we first spoke to them when we were looking for a new hosting partner, they have been highly responsive to our needs. Since then, they have been very involved daily, proactively identifying and handling issues as they happen. They are very responsive at all levels of the company and typically respond to our inquiries within minutes instead of hours, like we were used to with our previous hosting provider. Our support experience and the quality of our hosted services have improved significantly since we started working with amazee.io.”

Leveraging Smartsheet’s AWS cloud service infrastructure and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), amazee.io was responsible for provisioning it to run Lagoon and assumed ongoing maintenance and support. Their dedicated cluster is built to instantly autoscale to meet traffic peaks, whether stemming from a press release, marketing campaign, or a live virtual event. During a large event, their infrastructure is autoscaled by a factor of four immediately to handle the stress on the system. This would not have been possible with Smartsheet’s previous hosting provider.

Smartsheet also leverages amazee.io’s CDN and WAF tooling, adding an extra layer of protection against malicious activity while delivering maximum uptime and performance. WAF rules deployed on the amazee.io CDN block many common attacks from reaching the cluster. 

At the cluster level, we enabled the open-source tool ModSecurity on the ingress routers. This heads off more advanced attacks like SQL injections and the execution of nefarious scripts. This tiered approach to security removes the burden on Drupal to intervene and conserves the resources that would be required to handle such attacks at the application level. With proactive monitoring, amazee.io is by Smartsheet’s side 24/7 whenever questions or concerns arise. Issues are few and far between, but we maintain a fifteen-minute SLA around the clock and often respond within minutes.

With Smartsheet’s team of highly skilled developers—some of whom are even Drupal Core contributors—amazee.io maintains a trusted partnership built around a shared passion for open-source web development. 

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