CodeStream makes it easy for development teams to discuss code and save discussions alongside the codebase building a valuable knowledge base over time. The New York based Y-Combinator company integrates with all of your favorite IDE’s, and is led by technology veterans from RingCentral, IAC, CBS, and Naspers, with a solid track record of five successful exits including ask.com, multiply.com, glip.com, idoc.com, and commissioner.com. Check out the CodeStream demo to see how it works.

With over 25 years of experience building and launching startups, Co-Founder James Price was focused on getting their product to market faster without getting bogged down in infrastructure management. They found that in order to get traction with development teams, they had to exist in all the IDE editors that developers use cumulatively, including Atom, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio - this is what they primarily wanted to focus their development resources on. Having participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch, their business was propelled forward at an excellent rate, and put them in a position to seek out a managed solution for MongoDB to accelerate their product growth.

The CodeStream platform uses MongoDB as a data store for all of the snippets and conversations around their code blocks. Having years of experience working with MongoDB, they knew that managing their infrastructure and production workloads internally would be too time-consuming and result in at least one to two developers being pulled away from product. So, they began researching Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions to help them automate their MongoDB management on AWS.

CodeStream found ScaleGrid’s Startup Program for MongoDB, and applied to save 90% on their MongoDB database management through their Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) plans. They were looking at a couple different DBaaS solutions, including MongoDB Atlas, but ultimately decided on ScaleGrid because of their ability to host MongoDB in their own AWS cloud account, and keep full SSH access to the underlying machine. Since the instances are hosted in their own AWS account, they can also leverage their free AWS startup credits, effectively reducing their machine costs to $0. In the longer term, they can purchase AWS Reserved Instances to cut their machine costs up to 75%.

With all their development horsepower going towards building CodeStream for each IDE, they needed someone else to take the heavy lifting of MongoDB. What used to consume roughly 50% of a single person’s time, and only expected to increase as their cluster sizes grow and performance issues come into play, ScaleGrid was able to fully automate so they now spend virtually zero time managing MongoDB. CodeStream also found that with 24x7 support from ScaleGrid, they no longer need to hire a DevOps engineer to manage their database servers - this is cost saving that they can directly reinvest in their product. With ScaleGrid’s fully managed DBaaS, rather than focusing on MongoDB and the infrastructure needed behind it, they can spend their time getting up to speed with Node and TypeScript and work on CodeStream instead.

The fact that we can install ScaleGrid on instances that run in our own AWS account and have SSH access to them if we want, is the main reason that we chose Scalegrid over Atlas. Every time we have a question, ScaleGrid is there and answers quickly.

James Price | CodeStream Co-Founder

CodeStream was able to get to market both faster and more affordably with ScaleGrid’s DBaaS for MongoDB. When they looked at it from a long-term aspect, the fact that they didn’t have to employ hard-core MongoDB engineers was a huge win for them. The responsiveness of the ScaleGrid support team was also very valuable to CodeStream, as they were able to fix problems quickly by zeroing right in on the root cause. ScaleGrid was a much better choice for CodeStream than employing an internal MongoDB expert, and can now focus 100% of their development efforts on supporting all the IDE’s required by their current and target customer base.

In the future, CodeStream also plans to leverage additional cost-savings benefits through ScaleGrid, including being able to take advantage of AWS Reserved Instances to lower their long-term hosting costs up to 75%. ScaleGrid is the only DBaaS that supports the ability to host in your own AWS or Azure cloud account to leverage these savings, compared to paying on-demand instance pricing with another DBaaS service.