Hack The Box

Due to the success of its solutions, including simulations of real-world scenarios, Hack The Box found the need for high-performance cloud infrastructure in order to meet customer demand. One of the major drawbacks of their previous setup was the slow deployment rate of one of its core cloud services, which consisted of a browser-based workstation environment, called pwnbox.”

Previously, in order to serve both normal and spiked traffic conditions sufficiently, multiple redundant instances had to be set aside. This often caused failed deployments and bottlenecks while increasing cloud costs. To address these challenges, Hack The Box partnered with UpCloud to enhance operational performance while keeping costs in check.

“Onboarding with UpCloud was seamless. We enjoyed the easy-to-follow documentation and the fact that all our questions were answered immediately! During our PoC time, we saw significant improvements in good-to-go times for our services while the proposed private cloud plan decreased costs by around 30%.”

Thiseas Meggos, Director of Infrastructure, Hack The Box

Performance, stability and supportive communication

Hack The Box primarily uses UpCloud’s Private Cloud to run its workloads, offering the best combination of cost, guaranteed resources, and performance. It also allows the company to burst into the public cloud during times of heavy traffic when workload deployments spike by 150-300%.

“What made UpCloud the desired environment for our case was the bundled solution of performance and cost requirements along with the close communication and understanding of our needs,” says Thiseas Meggos, highlighting UpCloud’s API and Private Cloud environment as additional benefits, which allow precise resource allocation while maintaining full control, privacy, and cost transparency.

Hack The Box frequently hosts events where participants engage with content delivered via containers. In the past, due to the limited number of node ports available on most Managed Kubernetes solutions provided by other providers, the company had to create multiple clusters to meet demand. However, working closely with UpCloud, the company was able to overcome the limitations of traditional Managed Kubernetes node port allocation and streamline their infrastructure with a single cluster.

“Thanks to having a tailored solution specifically for our needs, we were able to bypass obstacles and limitations that we faced in the past, while keeping the setup simple and clear.”

Thiseas Meggos, Director of Infrastructure, Hack The Box

Close collaboration to overcome challenges

As with all migrations, challenges arose, but with close collaboration, solutions were quickly established. One such obstacle stemmed from the rate at which Hack The Box needed to deploy and delete workloads. Seeing that their team was nearing the concurrency limits of UpCloud’s service offerings, both teams worked closely together to investigate the issue and prevent any negative knock-on effects.

Once the cause was identified, the team at UpCloud designed and deployed a major refactoring of their provisioning logic to ensure that even at the busiest times, the deployment requests would remain below the concurrency limits of the UpCloud platform.

UpCloud proceeded to work on raising the concurrency limits of the platform as to avoid similar issues again. These optimisations also improved the performance of workload deployment time, resulting in a better experience overall whilst also further reducing costs.

“Despite the challenges, we were glad to have UpCloud willing to listen to our needs and adapt their solution in a way that would benefit both ends,” summarises Meggos.

These enhancements have been implemented across the entire UpCloud platform, benefiting all deployments. As a result of this R&D effort, UpCloud now offers industry-leading server spin-up times of just 45 seconds.

“The future seems bright between the two companies, as UpCloud’s roadmap aligns with Hack The Box’s strategic requirements in terms of platform features and even more cost-efficient solutions.”

Thiseas Meggos, Director of Infrastructure, Hack The Box

Are you ready to transform your business? Contact UpCloud today or signup for a self-service trial!