"We couldn't find anyone else offering the combination of engineering time, on-call SLA, and infrastructure that Lithus
provides - all within our existing budget. Instead of just migrating our infrastructure, they gave us enterprise-grade support and solved problems we'd been
struggling with for months, without having to hire additional staff."
~ Keith Brink, Founder, PrepBusiness
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PrepBusiness, a Canadian SaaS company providing a warehouse management system for prep centers, was experiencing frustrating operational challenges that were impacting their ability to serve their global customer base effectively.
Mysterious Downtime Issues
Sporadic, undiagnosed downtimes lasting 1-2 minutes with lack of internal expertise to properly diagnose the root cause. Customer-facing services were timing out unpredictably.
Resource Constraints
An overloaded and under-resourced RDS instance, heavy reliance on external contractors for AWS stack maintenance, and limited visibility into system performance and bottlenecks.
Infrastructure Complexity
Integration with various AWS services including ECS, EKS, and RDS created growing complexity without corresponding internal DevOps expertise.
When PrepBusiness discovered Lithus, they were impressed by our unique combination of infrastructure provision, engineering expertise, and on-call support - something they couldn't find elsewhere in the market.
Dedicated Engineering Support
We established a direct Slack Connect channel linking our engineering team with PrepBusiness's founder and development team. This provides immediate access to our expertise alongside 24/7 on-call coverage for critical issues. PrepBusiness gains embedded DevOps and infrastructure expertise without the overhead of hiring and managing additional staff.
Seamless Database Migration
We established secure network connections between their existing AWS infrastructure and our private cloud. Using our proven RDS migration process, we maintained live database synchronization with our new PostgreSQL cluster (powered by Stackgres for high availability).
Due to the tight timeframes, and after consultation with PrepBusiness, we opted for a brief downtime during a weekend maintenance window rather than a more involved zero-downtime switchover. The final cutover took just 15 minutes.
Single-AZ Private Cloud Cluster
We provided rapid deployment with a clear pathway to multi-AZ upgrade, more than doubling hardware
resources at the same monthly cost, with full admin access and control over their infrastructure. While
starting with single-AZ deployment met their current needs and budget, we designed the architecture
with future multi-AZ expansion in mind, ensuring they can seamlessly scale to enterprise-grade
redundancy as their business grows.
Virtualisation Support via KubeVirt
We deployed KubeVirt to provide VM capabilities within their Kubernetes cluster, enabling support for any workloads requiring traditional virtual machines. This includes custom GitHub runners that we operate and maintain on PrepBusiness's behalf, providing them with dedicated CI/CD infrastructure without the complexity of managing runner infrastructure themselves.
After migration, we dedicated significant resources to solving PrepBusiness's mysterious downtime issues. Through weeks of monitoring, data gathering, and dashboard creation, we discovered the problem wasn't infrastructure-related but stemmed from occasional conflicts between business and maintenance jobs that would starve the database of resources.
Our team adjusted timing and intensity of scheduled tasks, increased resource allocations to prevent conflicts, created comprehensive monitoring dashboards, and established protocols for future issue prevention.
PrepBusiness continues to benefit from our ongoing support through direct Slack integration with our engineering team. We've also provided a clear roadmap for future scaling with multi-AZ deployment options that will deliver additional resilience and resources as their business grows.