shrebo Founder and CTO, Patrick Senti, uses cloud platforms to develop his technology to drive new ways of sharing resources, similar to the technology and economic forces behind Uber, AirBnB and Zipcar. The Swiss company won an innovation award from Swiss Federal Railways to provide an entire web services-based SaaS platform, starting in Europe where sharing is quite popular. As Senti, his executive team, and his board of directors look to make decisions about risk in the future, he trusts Cloud Foundry to help. He knows how fewer people, more efficient processes, and a scalable architecture can ensure SLAs are met, downtime is avoided, and cash can flow into his business. To learn more, visit pivotal.io/platform-as-a-service/pivotal-cf.

1. In the Post-Paper Era, cloud, mobile, local, and social applications have created entirely new ways of supporting human and machine interactions—often sharing information in ways that were never possible with paper.
shrebo Founder and CTO, Patrick Senti, uses cloud platforms to develop his technology to drive new ways of sharing resources, similar to the technology and economic forces behind Uber, AirBnB and Zipcar. The Swiss company won an innovation award from Swiss Federal Railways to provide an entire web- services-based SaaS platform, starting in Europe where sharing is quite popular. Shrebo doesn’t primarily provide end-user applications—they provide a cloud services platform and APIs for application developers. This includes search, booking, scheduling, provisioning, payment, and social endpoints surrounding the entire process of sharing resources. With these micro- services, third parties can cost effectively, quickly create sharing applications to automate logistics, optimize machinery, increase asset and fleet utilization, and run services for sharing any resource like cars, bikes, or parking spaces.
CHALLENGE
Focusing a Start-Up on Architecture, Scale, and Developer Effectiveness from Day One
Having recently led the architecture and software engineering for a service-oriented, backend financial securities platform, Senti faced a new architecural challenge with shrebo. With 20 years of software experience, including machine learning, at companies like IBM, SAS, and Credit Suisse, Senti saw how the architecture called for a level of scale beyond traditional banking systems, and Senti began his journey by looking at architectures from Twitter, Facebook, and others to understand how shrebo would need to scale in the future.
Since architectures are sustained for years or decades, Senti knew the foundation was crucial. In addition, shrebo’s business model as a cloud-based API included a requirement for extreme scale. Lastly, Senti’s lean development team needed to be able to focus on developing software instead of working on operations.
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
•
Start-Up Environment with Resource Constraints
•
Need for a High Scale Cloud Architecture
•
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness and Efficiency
Solution
•
Cloud Foundry on CenturyLink’s PaaS: App Fog
•
RabbitMQ for Pivotal CF
•
Redis for Pivotal CF
•
MySQL for Pivotal CF
Key Benefits
•
Improved Customer Experience for shrebo’s Customers in the Sharing Economy
•
Elastic Compute and Data with Cloud Foundry
•
Flexibility, Agility, and Automation
•
Gaining a Robust Microservices Architecture
with RabbitMQ and Redis
•
Speeding Time to Market and Reducing
Operational Risk
CASE STUDY
shrebo
DELIVERING A SCALABLE, RISK-INTELLIGENT START-UP ARCHITECTURE FOR THE SHARING ECONOMY
OVERVIEW
“ Cloud Foundry is a real blast of an experience as a developer. We essentially package the application along with a services manifest and press a button. Everything else is done by the platform. This type of thing used to take days or weeks. Now, it takes minutes. As a CTO, this is the experience every developer has been looking for over the past 10 years.”
— Patrick Senti, Founder and CTO shrebo
pivotal.io

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All rights reserved. Published in the USA. PVTL-CS-369-08/14
Pivotal, committed to open source and open standards, is a leading provider of application and data infrastructure software, agile development services, and data science
consulting. Pivotal’s revolutionary Enterprise PaaS product, Pivotal CF, powered by Cloud Foundry, is available now.
CASE STUDY SHREBO
Pivotal 3495 Deer Creek Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 pivotal.io
SOLUTION
Designing the Prototypical Architecture for a High-Scale
Start-Up
According to Senti, “From any perspective, we needed stability
at the ground level. A solid, cloud-based PaaS would allow us to
move with agile development practices and devops automation
so that no one would get bogged down into technical details like
the OS, database, or deployment. We began to evaluate several
platforms including Amazon and App Fog who was recently
acquired by CenturyLink, a member of the Cloud Foundry
Foundation. Ultimately, our in-depth review led us to Cloud
Foundry. We wanted a platform that was higher up the stack—this
way, we could distribute our service without having to handle any
element of lower level services and even move clouds if needed.”
As they began to pilot and test Cloud Foundry, the shrebo team
found that Cloud Foundry based platforms excelled at delivering
the plumbing their developers dreamt about. The shrebo APIs
needed to scale elastically so that they could meet performance
SLAs without deploying new code, and Cloud Foundry delivered
an elastic runtime. Working primarily with Python/Django, the
development team also wanted to easily add data platforms like
MySQL or Redis without delay. They also wanted to be able so
switch to other development languages if needed. Cloud Foundry
on CenturyLink allowed the team to run Python, Ruby, Java, Node.
js, and Go and extend the platform for new runtimes or data
services if their situation called for it. Of course, Senti was no
stranger to the scale impact of message brokers, and they also
saw how easy it was to deploy RabbitMQ. Lastly, they realized the
power of the Cloud Foundry community—that new updates and
services were being made available all the time.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Improved Customer Experience for shrebo’s Customers
With Cloud Foundry’s Elastic Runtime Service, shrebo APIs can
scale to meet customer SLAs. Ultimately, this delivers uptime
and responsiveness to end-user applications that incorporate
shrebo’s functionality. Since shrebo’s capabilities can impact
asset utilization and optimization, this can ultimately have a direct
impact on revenue.
Elastic Compute and Data with CenturyLink App Fog and
Cloud Foundry
Shrebo has been able to reduce downtime to nothing. In one
case CenturyLink was undergoing upgrades, and shrebo was
able to dynamically provision their apps around the data center
downtime—while infrastructure changes happened occurred
over time at the Singapore, Ireland, or U.S. data centeres, shrebo
configured their app to run out of the other two datacenters. This
happened automatically, and shrebo didn’t have any down time
even though one of their data centers did.
Flexibility, Agility, and Automation
According to Senti, “Cloud Foundry is a real blast of an experience
as a developer. We essentially package the application and press a
button. Everything else is done by the platform. This type of thing
used to take days or weeks. Now, it takes minutes. As a CTO, this is
the experience every developer has been looking for over the past
10 years. We get the power of scripting—an event can trigger just
about anything we need.”
Gaining a Robust Microservices Architecture with RabbitMQ
and Redis
Given the fact that Pivotal’s RabbitMQ and Redis services are
made to work well with Cloud Foundry, shrebo experienced
a very easy way to ramp these services. RabbitMQ messages
rely on Redis as an in-memory store and ensure distributed
transactions are managed safely. RabbitMQ also helps to integrate
processes between synchronous and asynchronous, long-running
application workloads.
Speeding Time to Market and Reducing Operational Risk
“Since I have a history with financial services, it is easy to make
a comparison of running on a next-generation stack like Cloud
Foundry. While legacy applications bring constraints, there is a
huge difference in what is possible in terms of deployment times
and risk. At a bank, any given service might take 4-6 months to
deploy because of the complexity involved. With Cloud Foundry,
you can reduce that time to days and use fewer resources to do
it—there is an order of magnitude improvement in time to market
and risk.”
CONCLUSION
As Senti, his executive team, and his board of directors look to
make decisions about risk in the future, he trusts Cloud Foundry
to help. He knows how fewer people, more efficient processes,
and a scalable architecture can ensure SLAs are met, downtime is
avoided, and cash can flow into his business.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about our products, services and solutions, visit us
at pivotal.io.