Today’s Featured BizSpark Startup is Stackify from Kansas City, USA
Matt Watson has been around the startup block. After his last stint as founder and CTO of a startup that always struggled because the team didn’t have the tools to troubleshoot problems effectively, he decided his next company would make it easier for developers to monitor, analyze and resolve their applications.
“With Stackify, I wanted to provide developers with the tools to understand their applications’ performance and easily troubleshoot and fix them,” says Watson, CEO of Stackify. “We use the Microsoft stack for everything we do, plus open source software where it makes sense.”
Founded in 2012, Stackify is hosted entirely on Microsoft Azure and Windows. It uses Azure Cloud Services and ASP.NET for its web framework. While also taking advantage of open source solutions like Redis for caching and Elastic as a full-text search engine running on Linux in the Microsoft Cloud. It also employs dozens of virtual servers as necessary.
“Stackify’s APM and Log and error solutions are operating effortlessly at a massive scale that is growing exponentially, we rely on Microsoft Azure to ensure we can scale to support our customers,” explains Watson. “We designed our system up front to benefit from Azure’s scalability, actually.”
In a crowded space of cloud service providers such as AWS and Rackspace, and private data centers, Microsoft Azure was the clear choice for Stackify because of its ability to provide unique offerings such as Service Bus and Shared Cache.
“I can confidently say that when a client decides to ship us millions of extra log messages in an hour, our solution can instantly scale to meet that demand with no additional lag or bottleneck in processing time,” says Watson. The company is currently experiencing 30 percent growth, month over month, by offering three products: Application performance management (APM+), Error & log management (Smart ELM) and application & server monitoring that can work as stand-alones or all together as a single, integrated platform. It handles billions of messages on Service Bus and Table Storage monthly, thousands of SQL Azure databases, and hundreds of compute instances.
Watson says the “incredible tooling” of Azure has allowed Stackify to quickly build efficient release workflows, quickly deploy and scale as needed with no downtime involved.
“The benefits of Azure PaaS make it a no-brainer decision, really,” adds Watson. “The days of buying storage and standalone servers is a complete waste of time. Azure has all those features at a low cost, especially when you come in through BizSpark, add to that Stackify’s solution and you can also analyze your Azure based solution’s performance in real-time”
Microsoft BizSpark is a program for startups that offers free Microsoft tools and software for three years. Using its benefits – such as free access to Microsoft Azure – Stackify now has a product with paying customers in 19 countries.
Matt Watson, Founder and CEO, Stackify