Vilkas

Until summer 2024 Vilkas was running its servers on VMware. But once it became apparent that the Broadcom merger was going to introduce significant licensing changes, the team needed to find a cost-effective, highly scalable, and responsive private cloud solution.

As a trusted software-as-a-service provider to more than 1,800 merchants, Vilkas is committed to ensuring its customers enjoy fast, responsive, and reliable hosting that delivers seamless performance at all times. When CTO Tatu Wikman began exploring options for a scalable cloud solution, he recalled his positive experiences with UpCloud from personal projects and decided to investigate whether the platform could meet Vilkas’ demanding requirements.

“After evaluating different solutions, we conducted a brief trial period to assess UpCloud’s capabilities and scalability. The results were impressive, and it became clear that UpCloud was the ideal choice for our needs. From there, we carefully planned and executed the migration process to ensure a smooth transition for our customers.”

Tatu Wikman, CTO at Vilkas

Fullstack migration in just four months 

In just four months, Vilkas migrated its entire environment to UpCloud – building new services and servers from the ground-up to maximise availability, scaling, and responsiveness for merchants. 

“Twenty years of Vilkas’ history was moved into UpCloud in four months. Because our stack is not cloud-native, it requires its own versions of database servers, and this has been easy to spin-up in UpCloud.”

Tatu Wikman, CTO at Vilkas

Today, Vilkas runs its servers on UpCloud across four European data centers, alongside leveraging private networking and UpCloud’s Managed Load Balancer. The engineering team has also been able to cherry-pick and integrate the projects that work best for them, such as leveraging Zabbix for 24/7 topic monitoring. 

Faster than ever 

Migrating to UpCloud has had an immediate impact on Vilkas’ merchants – providing the scalability, flexibility, and responsiveness they expect. For Vilkas, the ability to easily scale as-needed has been hugely beneficial. 

“The shopping experience for customers has to be lightning fast, and running on UpCloud servers means we can offer our merchants a more reliable and faster service. It’s partly the speed of UpCloud servers, and that they’re nice to work with, and partly because we took care to optimize our set-up as part of the migration. Altogether, the efforts we have put in have made our merchants really happy,” Wikman said. 

“When you’re competing against Amazon and other significant players, you need to offer compelling reasons for merchants to choose your services. We differentiate ourselves on speed, so the fact that we have been able to provide our merchants better results on Lighthouse tests is very important.”

Noora Kahra, CEO at Vilkas

Next Steps 

As Vilkas expands across global markets, its product roadmap includes new features and products to deliver outstanding services, such as RateCompass – a new European product review service for ecommerce merchants. Alongside, the engineering team is exploring adopting more of UpCloud’s offerings, including the Terraform Provider.