Amplemarket is a cutting-edge AI-powered sales platform that helps B2B companies identify and engage with their ideal customers. Founded in 2018, the company has rapidly grown to over 100 employees and serves clients across various industries worldwide.

As Amplemarket scaled its operations, the company faced increasing complexity in managing its software ecosystem and enforcing standardization of best practices. Unwilling to compromise on product quality, Amplemarket needed a robust solution to maintain an accurate inventory of their growing number of services and assets, ensure compliance, and optimize their tech stack.

With the rapid increase in the number of engineers and teams, other challenges emerged: the mounting hours engineers spent unblocking each other, as most information was hard to find and relied on tribal knowledge, Additionally, senior engineers dedicated significant time to supporting new-hire onboarding due to a lack of a centralized knowledge base. This issue required immediate attention.

No more spreadsheets

To keep track of teams, services, and cloud resources, Amplemarket relied on manual spreadsheets, regular multi-team syncs, and audits to monitor the maturity of their software usage and the adoption of engineering quality and reliability standards. This approach was time-consuming, error-prone, and lacked real-time visibility into their software landscape. In many cases, this exercise was a wasted investment since the spreadsheets were rarely consulted—everyone knew they quickly became outdated and offered little value.

Amplemarket knew this wasn’t a long-term solution. Fortunately they found Rely.io.‍

When we started Amplemarket, everything was easily tracked and spreadsheets worked well. However, at our current scale, it's impossible to use spreadsheets effectively. They take too much time to maintain, and nobody really uses them since their information is often outdated.
Tiago Sousa, Head of Engineering at Amplemarket.

Enabling developer autonomy and reducing ticket ops

To enforce standardization and best practices across the organization, Amplemarket created specialized teams responsible for infrastructure deployments and maintenance, CI/CD, coding best practices, business processes, and platform reliability. While this approach improved work quality and enabled consistent practices, these teams often became bottlenecks, slowing down multiple development teams waiting for pending tasks.

Recognizing that their journey was incomplete, Amplemarket realized they needed to enable developer self-service and use the specialized teams' valuable work more efficiently.

At Amplemarket, we're constantly adapting to new and better ways of working. It's the only way we can perform at our best and do more for our customers. With specialized teams, we knew we were taking a step forward—but not reaching our final destination.
Tiago Sousa, Head of Engineering at Amplemarket.

Why did Amplemarket choose Rely.io?

To overcome these challenges, Amplemarket was looking for a SaaS solution that would enable them to: 

• Improve visibility on services and cloud resources: Gain access to up-to-date information on services built in-house, deployments and the cloud resources that resulted from their deployments to allow for faster problem resolution and more effective cost control.
• Optimize new-hire onboarding process: Reduce the dependency on senior employees that centralize most of the knowledge around services and how to operate them to improve their productivity and satisfaction.
• Enforce best practices across the organization: Enhance visibility on production readiness and team performance in a way that encourages teams to embrace best practices and defined processes rather than looking at them as a burden.
• Reduce developer dependencies and wait times: Enable developer autonomy while paving golden paths that guide them to desired engineering standards, enforcing standardization from day one.‍

Rely.io's software catalog, self-service actions and scorecards capabilities provided Amplemarket with a comprehensive solution that would help them achieve the proposed goals in no time and without much effort due to its opinionated approach and automation capabilities.‍‍

Streamlining Service Management

Amplemarket strategically leveraged Rely.io and its plugins to target services throughout their lifecycle by configuring Git and Cloud providers. Using Rely.io's advanced discovery and mapping capabilities - which follow recommended cloud resource tagging best practices - they centralized all their relevant services, documentation, deployments, environments, and cloud resources in one accessible location.This approach not only improved Amplemarket's visibility into their services but also streamlined the onboarding process for new hires and team members across the organization decreasing the onboarding time and improving employee satisfaction.

Enabling developer autonomy

With Rely.io's self-service capabilities, Amplemarket was able to leverage the work of specialized teams more effectively by turning best practices into self-service actions. Developers can now use these without requiring anyone else's time or attention.Within the self-service hub, they created templates for the services developers can created (e.g. Go microservices, APIs, new Kafka Topic, new cron jobs, and more), provided a catalog of cloud resources developers can create with a couple of clicks and provided one-click deployments and rollbacks to make it easier for developers to ship changes to production with quality gates built into the process.Developers can now deploy and maintain resources they're accountable for while effortlessly following organizational standards. For high-impact actions (such as those exceeding company-defined cost thresholds or production deployments), an approval mechanism ensures users can't perform tasks alone that require collaboration or higher-level approval.

Tracking and enforcing best practices

With Rely.io’s built-in scorecards, Amplemarket was able to quickly identify areas where they had to improve from a production readiness perspective which allowed them to prioritize their actions based on concrete up-to-date information.‍ Amplemarket leveraged leaderboards to foster healthy competition amongst teams, challenging them to rank first in scorecards like Service Production Readiness and DORA metrics. This initiative not only engaged teams in a productive and fun activity but also enhanced Amplemarket's ability to deliver high-quality products to their customers. After all, no one likes to be last!

Amplemarket’s favorite feature

A feature we now love, but didn't initially value much, is 'Discovery'. Like any fast-growing company, we have numerous experiments, old projects, and repositories. The ability to choose which resources end up in the Software catalog is a time-saver and a great experience for anyone maintaining the platform.
Tiago Sousa, Head of Engineering at Amplemarket.

When users configure any plugin in Rely.io, it triggers a discovery process to collect information from the source. Once collected, all new entities are listed on the "Discovery" page, where users can accept or ignore their creation.

This process gives users more control over which entities are relevant enough to import into the catalog. It's particularly valuable for Git providers, as customers don't want to clutter their software catalog with non-relevant projects or demo environments that could negatively impact their scorecards.

Future goals with Rely.io

Moving forward, we want to explore Scorecards in more depth and create new ones to track our own business metrics. Additionally, we'll extend our use of Self-Service Actions to allow developers to do more than creating new projects and deploying infrastructure resources. This continued investment in standardizing our approach will allow us to reduce bottlenecks even further, allowing developers to focus on what's truly important: building new features and delivering more value to our customers faster.
Tiago Sousa, Head of Engineering at Amplemarket.

By working with Rely.io, Amplemarket achieved quick wins that had a real business impact on their product reliability. It also improved the onboarding process for new hires, resulting in increased employee engagement and satisfaction.

We're excited to see what's next. Thank you for trusting Rely.io!