UpCloud and Montel – Partnership to bring Kubernetes to Cloud Natives

This is a summarized version of a blog article that was originally created for UpCloud's blog. We also wanted to share the story with our blog readers, so here you are. For the full version, please follow this link.

Two years ago we became an UpCloud partner and that partnership has grown over time. In this blog post our CTO Lauri Kainulainen is talking about the partnership and it's benefits to our clients.

“We’ve been using UpCloud in some capacity since day one, but our partnership started in 2021,” says Kainulainen. During that time, UpCloud moved to offer Cloud Native products, which is at the core of Montel’s service offering.

A trusted partner

Kainulainen says UpCloud’s customer service is a crucial part of the partnership, and the ability to work closely with technical members of the team is an advantage not just to Montel but to its customers, too.

“We use Slack to get in touch with UpCloud if our clients have any issues, and because of our direct link with the team, it’s super fast to resolve them. A non-technical middleman would be a massive waste of time and effort.”

Kainulainen says Montel’s trust in the team at UpCloud shows through to its customers, who are put at ease by the close relationship Montel has with their cloud service provider.

Total cost optimization

Also, some of Montel’s customers are looking to switch cloud service providers, not just for more responsive support, but to optimize their expenditure too.

“With the current market situation, we’re seeing a lot of cost saving where customers now want to switch their infrastructure from larger US companies to more nimble ones, especially in Europe, where UpCloud is GDPR compliant, and everything will be secure. When you also save money, it’s kind of a no-brainer.”

“When you look at just the raw price of a server cost from UpCloud versus a server from one of the hyperscalers, that will already give you quite a large saving.”

But cost optimization isn’t based on raw server price alone but also on paying now for savings later. Montel is actively recommending UpCloud to some customers for better reliability and functionality, which will save on costs further down the line, where they might have missed out on sales before because of server downtime.

“We also work with other cloud providers, some with lower prices than UpCloud, who also have European servers. The major factor for our customers who move from these providers to UpCloud is the 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA), where UpCloud offers virtually no downtime. Some of our customers who are on cheaper plans are ready to double their spending just to attain that last 1% of uptime.”

Win-Win situations

UpCloud can also rely on Montel when providing services that aren’t part of UpCloud's core offering.

“We only work with Kubernetes,” says Kainulainen.

“We won’t touch any other kind of infrastructure setup unless we’re migrating it to K8s. UpCloud can call us into cases where it’s obvious that the client wants to run a very modern infrastructure based on Kubernetes. And because we have a set fixed price, the client knows exactly what they’re getting.”

With the launch of UpCloud’s Managed Kubernetes platform, how does Kainulainen think this will help Montel?

“We’ve been setting up Kubernetes on top of our infrastructure for years. For us, the impact of having UpCloud Managed Kubernetes is that it takes a small chunk of the work that we do and moves it to the infrastructure side, allowing us to focus more on what actually runs inside the cluster and how we manage the whole ecosystem around it.”

“That really helps us, and we already have our first project running on top of it, which will go to production this summer. I know we’ll be using it more and more because we know it will result in fewer moving parts for us and our clients.”