Necessity is the mother of invention

In 2009, the founders of Giant Swarm weren’t the founders of Giant Swarm. They were the founders of Adcloud, a real-time data-driven ad exchange. Fast-forward to 2011 and they were already competing with the likes of Google servicing more than 10k transactions per second. Operating at this scale demanded that they move fast and innovate even faster. To achieve this they did something quite unconventional at the time — they adopted microservices architecture.

Creating solutions for the future

Pioneering this path paid off, but soon they were quickly outgrowing different PaaS solutions while still seeking the freedom needed for their use-case. They searched for a tried-and-tested, flexible solution but this was unsuccessful simply because no solution on the market existed — unless they created one. And so, that’s exactly what they decided to do: build and maintain microservices infrastructure themselves.

Turning challenges into opportunities

However, the team became painfully aware of how much time and energy was needed to do this. With at least ⅓ of the engineers’ workday being spent on just building and maintaining the infrastructure, it was obvious that while the solution might be right, the approach was not sustainable. This was especially true since their core business remained something other than this ever-increasing and complex task.

But this raised the question; what if they used their experience to solve this problem for other companies?