Why FlowPath Chose Cycle for Their Facilities Management Platform

Facilities managers have long depended on spreadsheets, word documents, and other antiquated software to handle their extensive list of work orders, maintenance tasks, events, notifications, projects, and reports. While these tools were a step in the right direction, they left many wishing for a better, more efficient way.

Since 2020, FlowPath has been on a mission to be that change, to bring sanity to the work of facilities management through their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Their software can eliminate the need for managers to use four to five different types of tools that may include paper, phone, text, digital documents, and email.

Their technology vision is led by Brandon Cummings, CTO and a founding member of the company. An executive leader with a history of success, Brandon has managed to guide his highly successful (top 10% of startups in the Southeast) startup through its early days and now into a period where:

"We're looking to triple our user base this year, and scale even more next year" - Brandon Cummings, CTO, FlowPath

So how does a platform like FlowPath navigate all the landmines of the current cloud native landscape with almost perfect uptime, delivering new deployments often, and not having a huge DevOps maintenance budget?

Growth

In 2022 the platform was growing quickly enough that the FlowPath team decided to bring on some venture funding. They raised a $1.2 million round and were accelerating into a period of growth that led Brandon to consider a few questions.

Are We Outgrowing Heroku?

Like many, the early appeal of Heroku was its hands off, GitOps style approach to deployments. For the FlowPath team, it meant moving fast in the early days of their operations. However, it was time to scale this platform and the path laid out to scale on Heroku just wasn't attractive. Cost, flexibility, outages, and an overall ancient platform wasn't the future they were looking for.

What IaaS Platform Provides the Most Value?

Along with their funding, AWS and GCP offered the team a mountain of credits (as is normal for venture funded startups). FlowPath didn't have a need to go multi-cloud, but wanted to remain provider agnostic.

"Vendor lock was looming a bit in my mind. I'd heard and read stories of teams unable to get out from under the grip of tightly coupled IaaS services. It was a fate I didn't want for our team", says Brandon.

The team also had to consider what the future looked like and if now would be the right to adopt more modern technologies like containerization, highly available architecture, and more sophisticated rainbow deployments.

Changes

Brandon landed on the idea that their team would migrate to AWS and move to a highly available fault tolerant architecture. He wanted to take advantage of AWS RDS for his database solution, but also wanted to use some tooling that would give him that Heroku-like, GitOps deployment.

Cycle brought a solution to the table that checked off all the boxes.

With Cycle:

• It was possible to consume AWS EC2 for his infrastructure (using credits).
• FlowPath wouldn't be locked into using AWS if they decided later to move to GCP or one of our other supported vendors, because migrating infrastructure is as simple as migrating the containers.
• Within AWS, Cycle uses out of band networks, so connecting the Cycle VPC to other VPC's (like their RDS VPC) was simple through peering connections. This also prevented running publicly accessible databases, a big win for security.
• Deploying their platform in HA was taken care of through Cycle's native container deployment strategies.

The only big technological leap that'd have to take place was containerization. Working together, we were able to knock that out in a few short meetings and get everything online.

"Moving to Cycle was more than just an expression of all the different technology pieces I needed to solve. Their team was ready and willing to dive in and make sure we were in a position to succeed. It was like having a fractional DevOps team that I could rely on for the best information", says Brandon.

The things that didn't change are almost as important as the things that did. FlowPath still enjoys a hands off, GitOps driven, deployment model. They don't have to think about maintaining their infrastructure as Cycle makes sure they're always up to date with the latest release. Vendor lock isn't a concern as all of their core platform code lives in containers and can be migrated to a new provider at the flip of a switch.

Brandon likes to refer to Cycle as his "DevOps easy button".

"The nice thing here is", Brandon says, "I don't really have to focus much of my time on anything at the infrastructure, deployment, or container level. At the end of the day, having Cycle helps our team not need to hire a specialized devops engineer yet, and that saves us around 5 to 10 thousand a month. That's not including the fact that the same infrastructure on Heroku would likely cost us 10x our current spend at AWS."

A Plan For the Future

Growth led to changes and those changes became a solid bedrock for the future. Even after an explosive start, their platform is in a position to see user growth triple this year. The successful transition to AWS + Cycle helped ensure that FlowPath remains agile, scalable, and ready for the next phase of their journey.

With a clear focus on user satisfaction and platform stability, Brandon and his team are confident in their ability to handle increased demand and scale into even more growth.

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