From Vision to Action: How OpsGuru Supported Crewdle's Journey Towards Sustainable Tech

At the 2023 Collision Conference in Toronto, OpsGuru had the opportunity to sit down with Vincent Lamanna, CEO of Crewdle. In this chat, they discussed their work together and what it means to disrupt tech with impact and empower change through technology.

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Three years ago, in January 2020, before COVID-19 spread across the globe, Crewdle CEO Vincent Lamanna was working on building multiple products of varying sizes and frames, and he found himself thinking about how what he was doing could make a difference in people’s lives. While the initial idea was to work on enabling an easier path to homeownership, three months later, things took a sharp turn with the pandemic.

Vincent quickly decided to change direction.

Recognizing that what was happening worldwide would create significant shifts in our society and how we operated in our workplaces, he understood that remote work would be a top priority. More specifically, our relationship to data consumption would evolve, with everyone consuming more and more.

After coming across an article about the environmental impact of increased data consumption, Vincent had the idea to start Crewdle. He envisioned a future where seamless and high-quality streaming experiences are accessible to all, while minimizing environmental impact.

A Clear Vision to Impact Change

With the overarching vision of Crewdle clear, Vincent knew the first thing they would need to do was measure their impact on the environment as an organization. In 2020, they clocked one ton in emissions for the whole organization.

Wanting to explore more about sustainability, Vincent attended the ChangeNOW conference, and through conversations with other people there, he realized that the one-ton number wasn’t making sense and there had to be a more accurate way to measure their emissions.

After coming home, he worked with a vendor to do just that, and that experience helped form Crewdle’s approach to sustainability.

Crewdle Connects with OpsGuru

It was an introduction through AWS that led Vincent to meet the OpsGuru team in February 2022. Crewdle was looking for a cloud consulting partner that thoroughly understands Google Cloud (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). They also wanted a partner to create a detailed migration roadmap for their upcoming migration to AWS.

After the introduction, Crewdle, AWS, and OpsGuru had a handful of opportunities to meet face-to-face, which allowed the teams to form a strong rapport, both personally and professionally.

The OpsGuru team was immediately impressed with Crewdle’s business model. What stood out was Vincent's appetite to disrupt the industry, emphasizing making a difference in the community.

Over the next eight months, OpsGuru had helped Crewdle implement AWS Foundation, commonly referred to as a Landing Zone, to ensure that they can run secure and scalable workloads in AWS.

The process began with OpsGuru’s Clear Path Forward engagement, which involved creating a roadmap for the coming six months, focusing on AWS platform development. This plan would help Crewdle achieve security, reliability, cost optimization, and performance efficiency. The roadmap outline included:

• Startup Migration Acceleration Program (SMAP)

  • A roadmap specific to the GCP AWS Migration

• AWS Control Tower

  • A program specifically designed for Startups
  • Establishing a secure and scalable AWS foundation

• Engineering on Demand (EoD)

  • Implementing the migration roadmap
  • Preparing the new AWS environments
  • Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD

Becoming an Agent of Change

On the theme of disrupting the status quo and building tech with purpose, tech companies should think about their own level of accountability regarding their environmental impact.

The apps we use daily — Facebook, YouTube, email— consume data. For example, in 2021, there were 106 billion emails sent and received daily, which translates to 1.2 trillion rams of carbon emissions daily.

The tech sector needs to take responsibility for making products that are better for the environment and have a positive impact.

The way Crewdle approaches this dilemma is in four steps:

1. Define your purpose and impact metrics.
2. Measure and gather data.
3. Assess and evaluate.
4. Iterate and optimize.

When looking at the energy use for the Information Classification and Management (ICM) sector, widely cited forecasts suggest that the total electricity demand for information and communications technology (ICT) will accelerate in the 2020s, and the data centers will take a larger slice.

For organizations looking for opportunities to reduce overall energy consumption, Vincent suggests focusing on three key areas.

Use the Cloud When you deploy a server on-premise, for example, and your other applications utilize that server, it will consume more energy. The cloud providers' optimization can be leveraged to reduce consumption.

Go Serverless Going serverless brings another layer of optimization because you share your resources with many other apps and services. So, by doing that, you can ensure that you're running in the most optimal way possible.

Optimize Your Response Time + Content The third part is optimizing response times. Think about the API call. It takes one second, but if you start optimizing your code to 500 milliseconds, that's a 50% energy reduction, which is enormous.

Then, there’s optimizing your content. With photos, depending on the file format you choose, this will impact file size, and the bigger the file size, the more bandwidth and data it uses. If the PNG file is 120 kilobytes, but you optimize to a different format at 20 kilobytes, that's six times less in your file size.

Multiply that by a million visitors, for example, and you can see the scale of the impact you can have by making sure you're choosing the right format and optimizing accordingly.

For companies like Crewdle looking to reduce their overall energy consumption, OpsGuru’s Cloud Native Development practice can help with Application Modernization efforts. OpsGuru has helped several organizations adopt serverless and event-driven technologies, which helps conserve energy and optimize emissions.

Leveraging OpsGuru's Expertise to Thrive Beyond Cloud Migration

With the right partners, anyone can be an agent of change within their organization — and their community — whether they work for a six-person startup or a large organization.

OpsGuru provided Crewdle with a full suite of services and support to help them achieve their organizational goals and serve their customers and communities even more effectively.

Working with OpsGuru accelerated Crewdle’s Migration from GCP to AWS and they moved ahead confidently, knowing that OpsGuru had adhered to AWS’ Well-Architected Framework (WAR).

OpsGuru’s support allowed Crewdle to focus on other business initiatives, and Crewdle has since been able to partner with large enterprise companies.

With their initial engagement complete, Crewdle and OpsGuru are moving ahead with their next phase. Crewdle has commissioned OpsGuru to perform a series of remediations pertaining to a SOC2 backlog, preparing Crewdle’s AWS Environment for a SOC2 audit in late 2023, early 2024.