Podatnik S.A. cuts infrastructure costs by 40% owing to the cloud

CASE STUDY: PODATNIK S.A.

Every year, filing a tax return is quite a challenge for many Poles. To support them, Podatnik S.A. launched podatnik.info, a website for online tax return filing, in 2010.

The growing number of the PIT program users resulted in a challenge that Podatnik S.A. faced in 2014: ensuring high availability of the website.

CHALLENGES

Every month podatnik.info is visited by over a million of users. The hottest period is the first quarter of each year, when taxpayers file their returns with tax offices. This places a huge load on the infrastructure and demands an adequate compute and network capacity. Therefore, the website needed a solution which would guarantee data security and reliable operation, especially in the periods of heavy traffic and interest in the electronic tax return program. In addition to raw resources, it required guidance and support from a technological partner and a diverse team of engineers with extensive experience.

SOLUTIONS

Oktawave migrated the legacy infrastructure to the cloud and provided on-going maintence and support for the new environment. The website can be prepared well in advance of the tax filiing season. Every year Oktawave enables the company to run stress tests to ensure smooth operation. “We place maximum load on our environment and run various test scenarios to make sure thousands of Poles can file their returns peacefully when the time comes,” says Maciej Raszewski, CTO.

Podatnik S.A. also opted for the comprehensive technical assistance provided by the Oktawave Cloud Operations team, who ensure high availability on a daily basis. This makes the website better prepared for emergency situations.

Environment variability, emergency situations, performance tests, and equipment selection are the main and most important challenges that we meet owing to Oktawave S.A. Oktawave is not only an infrastructure provider — it is a team of people we can trust.

Maciej Raszewski, CTO

BENEFITS

Migration to the Oktawave cloud provided Podatnik S.A. with highly available and secure cloud infrastructure for its website, podatnik.info. The company considers scalability as the chief advantage of the cloud. Autoscaler ensures both horizontal and vertical scaling of the environment during the hot period. The machines are expanded and added “on the fly” and then deleted or shrunk after completing the task. The website is able to triple its environment for the required period within an hour. Autoscaler and the cloud have cut the company’s real infrastructure costs by 40% in relatively peaceful periods.

The number of users has increased by approximately 70% since the migration to Oktawave — and it keeps growing. When the company maintened its own physical servers, it needed to carefully analyze the costs and plan the tasks forced by the expanding environment well in advance. Today the cloud makes it simple and easy like a card payment, and it takes place in the background. The team of podatnik.info no longer has to rack servers or deal with procurement of new hardware — everything is provided and abstracted away by Oktawave. “We report the required environment changes and receive complete information along with technical support and a quote. The current costs can be conveniently analyzed in the customer panel,” Raszewski adds.

We know we can count on the responsive Cloud Operations team. The ease of communication and high SLA deserve praise. We do not have a feeling that our requests fall into a net of tickets which must follow the corporate process and go through several layers of management before they are finally handled. We feel that our requests are properly prioritized, especially in our most difficult period. The PS team perfectly knows when we may need support. They also assist us in performance tests. I think I can say that the tough period makes us one team.

Maciej Raszewski, CTO