Intro
Upheal needed a reliable partner to manage its AWS infrastructure. Based on recommendations and previous knowledge of the company, they chose Revolgy. After several months, they view the cooperation as the right step. Delegating infrastructure management saves time and money and helps them scale while maintaining security and data protection.
About the client
Upheal is a Czech‑American startup developing an app to facilitate the work of therapists. It operates primarily in the US mental health and health‑tech market. The company was founded by Juraj Chrappa and Martin Horváth and has won numerous awards and investment opportunities. By focusing on automation and digitization of psychotherapy processes, Upheal helps streamline therapists’ work and supports more accessible and effective mental health care.
Challenge
Before working with Revolgy, Upheal handled infrastructure management themselves, including monitoring and alerting. It was taking more time as the company grew and was not a core competence of the team. They considered either partnering with Revolgy or hiring an internal person for infrastructure management and were cautious at the start.
“Within our small team, it makes more sense to focus on the main topics of the company’s operation, like the product development that brings real value to our customers. Infrastructure management is not one of them; moreover, it can be very easily delegated to a partner. It is cheaper, faster, and with better results,” says Martin Horváth, CTO of Upheal.
“At first, we were a bit cautious about what to expect. We considered several options, including working with Revolgy or finding an internal person responsible for infrastructure management. But now we all consider it a very good step and decision. The Revolgy team is great to work with, and everyone is professional,” adds Horváth.
“Strengthening infrastructure management is very important from the point of view of overall security and personal data protection, which is absolutely key for our type of product.” — Martin Horváth, CTO, Upheal
Solution
Revolgy took over infrastructure management with two main areas: incident management and operations management, and supports Upheal’s growth and scaling.
- Incident management
- Revolgy helps resolve infrastructure problems as Upheal scales and reaches infrastructure limits.
- Revolgy guarantees a response within 15 minutes of receiving a problem report, covering periods outside of regular working hours and without unnecessary stress for the customer.
- Operations management and proactive work
- “We took over the overall management of the infrastructure from Upheal, including proactive prevention of problems and cost optimization. More and more companies are switching to managed services, and we definitely see a clear trend in this now and in the future. We have experts who have built and managed dozens of different infrastructures and know how to do it. It is a great feeling to stand by the side of fast‑growing startups,” says Roman Rozbroj, Account Executive for Revolgy.
- “The Revolgy operations team deployed alerting on the infrastructure, which is a combination of our monitoring solution and Upheal’s existing alerting, which we are constantly improving and deploying new tools to ensure oversight of the infrastructure. Application monitoring works similarly, and if it is an application problem, we escalate it to Upheal and then look for a suitable solution together,” says Tomáš Veliký, Operations Team Leader at Revolgy.
- Collaboration and process
- “We have a shared Slack channel where escalated alerts pop up, around which communication with our team takes place,” says Horváth.
- “We have regular syncs once a week and go through the priorities that need to be addressed from a DevOps perspective, for example, what needs to be changed or improved on the infrastructure. We started with a long list of things we didn’t have covered. Gradually, we have set priorities, and now we regularly go through and reduce the backlog we had prepared for onboarding. There is also ad‑hoc communication and meetings on specific topics, such as disaster recovery.”
- Disaster recovery and compliance
- “For example, we recently had an exercise in disaster recovery, or the ability to restore infrastructure during an outage, as required for SOC2 compliance. Together with Revolgy, we prepared scenarios and exercises and simulated a system outage in a controlled manner. We then tested how we were able to restore the individual components effectively,” says Horváth.
- “If we had dealt with disaster recovery ourselves within Upheal, it would have taken us much more time, as we would have had to find out everything on our own, and it would not have been of such high quality. But Revolgy already had experience with it, so we were able to prepare and play the whole scenario.”
- Operating model and timing
- “Outsourcing infrastructure management was a clear choice for us. Tasks falling outside the company’s core competencies are delegated to external services that employ experts and take care of everything. It simply does not pay off for us to recruit a DevOps specialist,” adds Horváth.
- “We primarily serve the American market and need to make necessary infrastructure changes outside of the US working hours. We, therefore, also benefit from the time zone difference, as we can easily make changes during our working hours, not affecting our primary market,” adds Horváth.
- “As for the cooperation with Revolgy, we do not have to deal with time allocation or the complex calculation and payment of worked hours. The model is cleverly linked to our cloud spend. We do not have to worry about how much time Revolgy spends on work. This is a very pleasant way of working together because it eliminates the need for us to have a complete overview of their involvement.
- It also has financial advantages for us. If we wanted to do things internally, we would have to be a much larger company and ideally have several people for both incident management and DevOps. With the same quality and work done, everything would definitely cost us more.”
Results
- Revolgy manages AWS infrastructure so Upheal can focus on product development.
- Time and cost savings by delegating non‑core work instead of hiring internally.
- Incident management with a 15‑minute response to problem reports outside regular working hours.
- Proactive prevention of problems and cost optimization.
- Monitoring and alerting deployed and improved over time, combining Revolgy’s monitoring with Upheal’s existing alerting.
- Clear escalation for application issues.
- Shared Slack channel for alerts and communication; weekly syncs; priorities and backlog reduced over time; ad‑hoc work on topics such as disaster recovery.
- Disaster recovery exercise completed for SOC2 requirements; scenarios prepared, outage simulated, and restoration tested.
- Time‑zone advantage for making changes outside US working hours.
- Financial model linked to cloud spend, avoiding complex time tracking and enabling predictable cooperation.
