Ponga - Well-Architected Review & Managed Services

“We feel we have found a real partner in Zuggand. They are very responsive, proactive and able to support us through our projected growth and transition to serverless microservices.” – CEO and CoFounder

Ponga is a fast, easy and fun way to organize photos, create stories and securely share them online with family and friends. Not only can you upload your own photos, but you can also add other media, such as video and audio recordings, to further develop your stories. With a focus on end user privacy, Ponga was designed so you can share your private spaces without the prying eyes of social media and advertisers. By leveraging modern technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and the cloud, Ponga has built a modern way to use pictures to bring extended families together with stories.

Ponga’s platform is currently hosted on AWS and leverages many native capabilities. By being “born in the Cloud”, Ponga was able to accelerate its initial development and deployment by leveraging the power of AWS. As with many growing startups, Ponga’s leadership wants to focus on releasing new features, acquiring new customers and growing their business; not worrying about the underlying infrastructure. In addition, due to the sensitive nature of the customer images and data they are capturing, ensuring the highest levels of security and privacy are of the utmost importance.

High Level Requirements:

• Ensure the security and privacy of its systems and customer data..
• Accelerate product development and deployment.
• Continuous monitoring of the AWS environment to ensure high availability.
• Improve the overall solution performance and user experience.

Following an initial conversation with Ponga’s founders, Zuggand first recommended having an AWS Well-Architected Review performed by Zuggand’s engineers to ensure they are following AWS best practices. As part of this process, Zuggand identified some areas in which Ponga could improve its AWS environment and assisted in remediating the most critical issues. Due to the fact Ponga used Zuggand to assist with remediation, they were able to receive AWS credits to offset some of Zuggand’s consulting costs.

In order to ensure their AWS environment is monitored, managed and supported effectively, Zuggand also recommended their AWS Managed Services offering. By leveraging Zuggand’s team of AWS engineers, this would free Ponga’s team to focus on adding new product capabilities and less on managing the infrastructure. Instead of adding a full-time engineer to their team, it would be more cost-effective to incur monthly operational costs and partner with Zuggand. And finally, as Ponga’s business grows, they can have access to Zuggand’s AWS Architects to assist in modernizing their architecture, further reducing operational costs and improving platform performance.

As a result of partnering with Zuggand, Ponga has solved many of its current business challenges. As AWS experts, Zuggand was able to assess where Ponga was not following AWS best practices and improve their overall AWS environment through the remediation process. As a result, Ponga enhanced its overall security posture to ensure its systems, customer images and data are secure and safe.

Zuggand’s Managed Services offering is designed specifically for start up companies. It is a cost-effective way to ensure smaller companies have the AWS expertise they need as they grow. By partnering with Zuggand, Ponga now has a team of AWS engineers as an extension of their organization to manage and maintain their environment. Ther CEO and Co-Founder was thrilled with the results and said, “Their technical team is top-notch and brought us in line with AWS best practices through a Well Architected Review. They have become an invaluable member of our team.” As Ponga’s business grows and their AWS needs change, they can leverage Zuggand’s expertise to help them along their journey.