vConstruct – What's in Your Stack?

Everyone is gaga for the cloud, but how exactly can you get your stuff up there? A local, Austin-based company is trying to crack that problem. Here’s what’s in vConstruct’s stack:

Who are you?

vConstruct helps companies migrate to and adopt cloud based technologies by providing tools and services. Our new product, MigrationPath, helps professional service organizations migrate their clients to the cloud, helps SaaS companies onboard new customers, and helps individual companies migrate their data to the cloud. My name is Art and I am VP Technology for vConstruct. I recently moved to Austin from Philadelphia at the end of March 2011.

How would you describe your development process?

We are a small, agile development team and we are currently working on 1 week iterations. We plan and create/estimate our tasks as a group, then we develop, test, and release. Right now we manage our development processes using Google spreadsheets, but we are currently evaluating more sophisticated tools. Once our iteration is complete, we deploy to a local server for testing, and then deploy to Amazon once testing is complete.

What tools are you using?

We use Visual Studio for development. Our product lives in the Amazon EC2 cloud, and our product can be deployed using simple XCOPY deployment. We wrote our own .NET deployment tool to copy the files up to Amazon. We also use the same deployment tool to deploy to our local server for testing.

A tool you’ve used recently that didn’t work out well?

We tried to use Rally Software to manage our development process. The tool had everything that we wanted, but it got very slow and clunky as more stories and iterations were added. We finally decided that it was too much of a hassle to use Rally and switched to Google docs. Definitely not the ideal solution, but our team is small enough that it works ok for us.

Anything else?

We are actively seeking developers, in particular a web application (UI) developer. Our job description is available on vconstruct.com/jobs. Follow us on twitter at @vConstruct. [Also, see their launch press release.]