London-based cloud storage scaleup completed blitz rebranding and product development

The scaleup wanted to enter a niche of SaaS Kubernetes storage management with a new product. Two problems stood in the way.

Ondat wanted to launch a SaaS platform that would make monitoring, billing, and management of instances more transparent and easier to handle.

Cloud and DevOps Engineers, their end-users, had pre-defined expectations of how a cloud storage product should support their daily work that Ondat had to meet. The group represented high-performers overloaded with information who needed a bare-bone tool.

The risk was that the users needed a platform superior in style, usability, and practicality to the ones owned by Ondat’s closest competitors.

Their product executive figured bringing in a partner to share responsibility for full product branding and development would increase the success of the product launch. Ondat also faced a  fixed deadline agreed on with the Board.

The assumption was that added talent can bring practical experience that would ensure the project can compete with similar solutions.

Ondat required Product Designers and more Backend developers on board.

The Software House filled the talent and knowledge gap in just one month where the company would have needed months to do so. The line-up included 4 Developers, 5 Product Designers, a QA Engineer, an Architect, and a Project Manager.

They joined Ondat’s ranks under their PO’s leadership and worked directly with the Development Lead, the technology leaders from the Cloud, Testing, and Salesforce units, and with business analysts.

Five months of design and development work with The Software House led to a successful product pivot. 

Ondat opened to new business opportunities with a platform made from scratch that looks and feels like top-of-the-line market options in the cloud storage segment.

Technology choice

Google Cloud Services, React (frontend), React Query, Node and Express.js (backend), Nest.js, Carbon Design System.

What Ondat achieved

As our Product Designers entered the project, investors had a set expectation of seeing new branding assets in just two weeks.

An engineer controls countless factors at work, so the product had to offer complete visual simplicity and great clarity. 

Designers decided on using blue as the primary color with green, yellow, and red as status colors everybody recognizes from traffic lights.

Working on user journeys revealed the dozens of views Engineers need to manage clusters, which the team mapped out by interaction. We used the Carbon Design System to shape the web app because of the square and spacious look of its elements that aids reading.

The product team delivered the branding right on time. The next challenge was to develop and integrate a Node.js backend to be connected with a service running on the Kubernetes cluster that communicated changes using a proprietary extension of the Kubernetes API.

The web app built by the joint team presents a Kubernetes cluster’s status and provides storage management functions.

By default, developers monitor clusters by using a collection of console commands to connect with the Kubernetes API. The system was designed to aggregate the data for them.

Our Backend developers had to present the console’s output on many views, but some values couldn’t be retrieved directly. 

For instance, reading a Pod’s status required processing two other commands with each returning digital clutter.

Splitting the app’s database into save and read (CQRS) allowed them to sort the information by time and remove non-critical data. The app became a real-time monitor without lags caused by backend processing.

The next step

A Frontend Developer and a Designer are assisting Ondat with Stripe integration and app maintenance.