Home ASAP Adopts the Cloud for More Reliability and Improved Performance
Introduction
Home ASAP offers turnkey marketing services for real estate agents, allowing them to reach a large potential audience of buyers and sellers in just a few clicks. Founded in 2011, the company prides itself on helping real estate agents free up their time so it can be better spent on clients and making sales instead of getting overwhelmed by the complexities of modern online marketing platforms.
Likewise, Home ASAP realized that to grow, they needed to relieve their development team from the burden of managing bare-metal hardware so that they could focus on products, features, and in-house management of vast national real estate data.
Challenges
By 2015, it was clear that Home ASAP needed to make changes to its bare-metal infrastructure to keep growing and scaling the business. At the time, the internal DevOps team had to pull late nights and weekend shifts to manage the infrastructure, leaving them little to no time to allocate to solving business problems.
This drive to move staff away from managing hardware that a provider could handle, and instead dedicating their time to more business-oriented projects, led Home ASAP to look for a partner to help implement and manage a virtualization environment. When reviewing their options, one concern the client had was about support. With big providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, they knew they would be on their own unless they paid big premiums for extra support.
After weighing cost variables, platform reliability, support, redundancies, and staff resource reallocation, Home ASAP chose TierPoint. “Support was a big differentiator,” said Josh Kelling, Principal Software Architect for Home ASAP. They were encouraged by the multi-tiered support available in all different parts of their solution, including resources at TierPoint who specialize in storage, backups, virtualization, and deployment recommendations.
Solutions
First, TierPoint worked with Home ASAP to help them migrate from bare-metal hardware to a fully virtualized green field environment. This included a managed firewall, load balancer, and virtualization environment that gave them the open canvas to create any type and quantity of virtual machines Home ASAP needed. The company also stood up 3 networks with TierPoint’s help and was able to get the firewall opened to migrate data from their old environment to the new one.
From there, Home ASAP used the open canvas as a flexible space to perform resource reallocation and run their microservices environment, which is composed of over 30 unique services in one system.
Before working with TierPoint, Home ASAP used to pay another company to ingest all of the real estate data and host it, making Home ASAP the secondary consumer of the data. This service included a hefty price tag, so the client wanted to build a system that could ingest data from all the listing services without the help of an intermediary. With TierPoint solutions, Home ASAP was able to build a set of microservices that query all individual MLS listings, pull in data, and normalize and store it in a way that makes it all searchable. In all, the basic technology stack includes about 35 virtual machines.
Results
Reliability has proven to be the most rewarding benefit for Home ASAP in the years since they made the switch to TierPoint. The entire company is hosted in TierPoint’s Raleigh data center. “One of the big tests that I think really made the TierPoint data center shine was when Raleigh suffered a a direct hit by a hurricane. We were 100% up through the entire event.,” said Kelling. While Home ASAP chose TierPoint due to the promise that networks and internet access would always be up thanks to multiple redundancies, the client was scared when they heard Raleigh would likely experience a direct hit from a hurricane, so much so that they did due diligence to back up data offline and ensure it was safe. However, they didn’t need to worry because Home ASAP never went down despite a natural disaster.
This experience has given Home ASAP peace of mind, and a “no news is good news” mentality to working with TierPoint.
Second to reliability has been the ongoing flexibility Home ASAP has enjoyed. Flexibility has allowed Home ASAP to do things like burst compute for additional resources, stand up new machines, migrate data, shut down other nodes, and move efficiently from one architectural footprint to a horizontally scalable one, even if it wasn’t in contract. Working with TierPoint has allowed Home ASAP to focus on how they want to build their applications and services while alleviating the DevOps team from having to manage hardware.
As Home ASAP continues to flourish, they hope to take advantage of additional consulting services in addition to the ongoing support and expertise they’ve come to rely on, allowing TierPoint to fill in technical gaps where needed. Home ASAP fills an important role for real estate agents, allowing them to focus on their strengths and outsource time-consuming processes. It’s only fitting they work with a partner who helps them do the same for themselves.
At A Glance
Industry
Real Estate / Marketing & Advertising
Technology
Multitenant Cloud & SQL Server
Challenge
Moving from bare-metal hardware to virtualization via an infrastructure with the power to handle the management of over 200 disparate data sources, giving internal staff more time to dedicate to growing the business.
Solution
Migrating to a virtualization environment with the help of TierPoint multitenant cloud and SQL Server. This open canvas environment with managed firewall, load balancing, and virtualization allowed Home ASAP to migrate data, rearrange resource allocation, and create any type and number of virtual machines needed.
Results
TierPoint has offered Home ASAP reliability and peace of mind, even in the face of natural disasters. TierPoint’s solutions have allowed the client to be more flexible, nimble, and growth-oriented with their internal staff.
Website
https://about.homeasap.com/
Keep Exploring
Visit our knowledge center to explore expert insights and thought leadership to power your digital breakaway.
To achieve reliability and performance goals, Home ASAP partnered with TierPoint – which also helped their team focus on growing the business.