Hexact Boosts Infrastructure Capacity 4x by Leveraging SADA’S Global Delivery Center

Small-to-medium-size e-commerce businesses often lack the necessary resources to hire robust internal technical teams, including a deep bench of developers. For these organizations, empowering operations with emerging technologies, such as AI and business intelligence solutions, can be too challenging or simply not affordable.

“We make web scraping and work automation truly accessible to businesses of all sizes,” says Stepan Aslanyan, CEO of Hexact. “Our customers use our portfolio of no-code solutions to delegate time-consuming, repetitive tasks related to data extraction, data sorting, data enrichment, and other day-to-day tasks.” 

Hexact provides change detection, web monitoring, and work automation through their key products: Hexomatic, Hexowatch, and Hexospark. Their combined platforms have over 250,000 users worldwide and currently process 20 million tasks a day. 

Business challenge

Since its beginning, Hexact has built innovative platforms on Google Cloud. “We are consuming almost everything Google Cloud offers,” says Aslanyan. “From regular instances to Compute, Storage, Cloud SQL, Gemini, OCR, voice, annotation, APIs, and translation, we have always appreciated Google Cloud’s innovative services and wide range of options.” 

One thing in common among the Hexact platforms is that they rely heavily on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Within months of the initial launch, Hexact began reaching predefined thresholds of consumption. Additionally, due to how the original Google Cloud infrastructure was set up, solutions needed optimization to launch faster. New instances spinning up and load balancing had to scale quicker, too.

Solution

To help Hexact with their needs, Google Cloud recommended SADA, a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, as a trusted solution provider and reseller partner. Hexact signed a three-year Google Cloud commitment with SADA as the foundation for the company’s growth and innovation. With SADA providing technical advisory services, Aslanyan gathered the needed resources to empower Hexact to achieve its business goals and strategic objectives. 

SADA conducted an architectural review of Hexact’s infrastructure running on Google Cloud. Based on this review, SADA created an analysis report detailing project structures for applications, predefined role permissions, network topology, virtual machines and groups, firewall rules, and an accounting of Compute resources leveraged in GKE. With unparalleled Google Cloud expertise, SADA helped Hexact analyze and optimize their cloud environment.  

Making recommendations for business success

Then SADA presented Hexact with recommendations to serve as the blueprint for migrating Compute instances to a GKE containerized environment and a series of best practices for infrastructure adjustments that would address Hexact’s scalability needs. 

It’s evident that SADA cares about our business success. It’s important to have a trusted partner, even if it’s just pure technical service support. SADA provides a level of comfort in knowing that if there’s a critical situation, they’ve got our backs. And you don’t have to go through some elaborate ticketing system or through a chain of command as with some other service providers.

Stepan Aslanyan | CEO of Hexact

Securing and hardening GKE, following IAM best practices

As an aspect of modernizing Hexact’s GKE instance, SADA set out to harden their Kubernetes clusters based on Google Cloud security best practices. The container security strategy included workload identity and container vulnerability scanning and mapping container resources against Google Cloud security best practices. 

“SADA helped us a lot by showing or explaining Google Cloud options, sometimes involving the Google Cloud team, who gave us many good recommendations,” says Aslanyan. “With that help, we were able to make product improvements and grow our user base. SADA and Google Cloud do all the heavy-duty cloud computing work so we can focus on our customers and delivering solutions to them.”

For Identity & Access Management (IAM), SADA provided consultative services on Google Cloud standards and best practices. With Hexact’s requirements for Single Sign-on (SSO) integration via SAML or OpenID, SADA recommended the configuration of Cloud Directory Sync for user provisioning. Cloud Identity & Access Management setup for roles/permissions needed to be done in accordance with their IAM roles worksheet and organizational policies 

SADA configured the creation and modification of groups for IAM roles with baseline, organization-level IAM policies as defined in the IAM worksheet. Baseline service accounts with IAM roles were also defined per the IAM worksheet.

Accelerating project timeline with SADA’s Global Delivery Center

Hexact leveraged SADA’s breadth of capabilities worldwide, interacting with team members, including the Project Manager, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Software Engineer, and Solutions Architect, from SADA’s headquarters in the United States and SADA’s Global Delivery Center (GDC) in Yerevan, Armenia, where Hexact employs a group of developers.  

“SADA’s ability to work around the clock was particularly helpful as we wanted to quickly upgrade our Google Cloud infrastructure,” says Aslanyan. “It’s very convenient to have our developers speak with SADA team members in their native language. We’ve found that communication is really easy and being in the same time zone is an added bonus.”

Impact

Constantly improving and updating the Google Cloud environment

As a result of working with SADA, Hexact has been able to focus on developing and delivering innovative product features to their customers while leaning on SADA for guidance in optimizing an ever-expanding infrastructure. With cloud services serving as the backbone of their business and service, Hexact has come to rely on SADA’s Google Cloud acumen.

Since working with SADA, we’ve gained the scalability to accommodate our user base’s 4X growth in services consumption. The best part is that we’re operating at virtually the same cost basis as before because SADA helps us constantly improve and update our Google Cloud environment.

Stepan Aslanyan | CEO of Hexact

Overall, SADA was able to help Hexact:

• Accommodate 4X user growth at the same cost basis
• Modernize their GKE instance with hardening and scaling capabilities
• Restructure their Google Cloud hierarchy with granular IAM permissions