mogenius

mogenius eliminates cloud development pain points with help from Cloudflare

Founded in Germany, mogenius is a fully automated platform for deploying cloud-based applications that was born out of frustration with the complexity of cloud infrastructure management. The mogenius platform automates the process of configuring cloud infrastructure, including container management and certificate management.

By automating configuration and management, mogenius enables developers to focus on development rather than administrative tasks. Thousands of software developers around the world use the mogenius platform.

Challenge: Automating security and network configuration management

mogenius’ core focus and value proposition lie in automating every step of building and managing a hyper-scaling cloud infrastructure, including streamlining container management and DevOps workflows. However, to offer fully managed and automated management to customers, it also needs to manage configurations at security at the network level. This includes SSL certificate and DNS management and protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and web application attacks.

Comprehensive security eliminates costly attacks

mogenius’ customer applications use a variety of different protocols, making it complex to ensure consistent security and access control across the board. To address this issue, the company uses Cloudflare Spectrum’s reverse proxy to offer improved performance and security to all TCP/UDP traffic.

According to Lepsky, the protection that Cloudflare provides is essential to the customer experience. “Even the smallest web application is targeted at some time by bots or attacks. We see this being taken care of in the Cloudflare dashboard, but the customer doesn't. They would never realize that they were under attack.”

By automatically identifying and blocking these attacks, Cloudflare saves mogenius significant time and effort. Benedikt Ilitisberger, Co-Founder and CTO at mogenius recalls, “One Saturday morning, we suffered an attack by a botnet that put high pressure on some API servers. Without Cloudflare, this would have taken us a day or two to mitigate the attack and implement a good solution. Instead, we logged into Cloudflare, blocked the attack, and went back to breakfast.”

Automated DNS and certificate management simplifies application deployment and maintenance

When deploying a new application, a great deal of configuration is needed to move from a development environment to production. Some tedious but essential tasks include configuring SSL certificates and DNS records to ensure that customers can actually access and use the new application.

With Cloudflare, mogenius can automate the process of managing SSL certificates and DNS settings. According to Jan Lepsky, mogenius’ CPO, “SSL for SaaS allows us to actually deliver on our goals of automation and simplicity. The main value of SSL for SaaS is that customers just need to click a simple switch in the DNS settings, and everything just works, enabling developers to focus on their code.”

Without Cloudflare, mogenius and its customers would spend much more time manually configuring SSL certificates and DNS settings. According to CEO Gerrit Schumann, SSL for SaaS saves customers thousands of days of work per year. Additionally, Cloudflare DNS eliminates the need for mogenius to operate a DNS server for its 56 DNS records and thousands of customer domains and URLs.

In addition to simplifying the configuration process, Cloudflare enables mogenius to simplify and automate the process of managing its customers’ cloud infrastructure. According to Iltisberger, “Cloudflare has an API for everything. We can pull data and fix issues for our customers without them even noticing.”

High-performance network supports a global community

mogenius supports developers located all over the world. As technical experts, they have high expectations regarding the performance of the applications that they host on the mogenius platform.

According to Iltisberger, the Cloudflare global network is essential to meeting these expectations. He says, “One of our customers is located in Argentina, but his applications are hosted in Frankfurt. When I asked about performance and latency, he said that it was mind-blowing and fast.’ I was thinking, ‘That has to be Cloudflare. The data delivery to Argentina is so fast, no matter where the applications were hosted.”

By routing traffic over the Cloudflare network, mogenius improves performance and decreases its infrastructure costs. Approximately 46% of requests hit the cache, providing a faster response and reducing load and bandwidth requirements for origin servers.

Cloudflare solutions enable focus on core business

The automated network-level configuration and management provided by Cloudflare is a core component of the mogenius platform. The Cloudflare support team is essential to this success. According to Iltisberger, “We’re very happy with the support we are receiving from the Cloudflare team. We can always rely on their help.”

Cloudflare solutions enable mogenius to scale and focus on automating cloud infrastructure management. Lepsky says, “Managing everything that Cloudflare does for us in-house would take up at least 20% of our time. With Cloudflare, we can focus on optimizing cloud development and deployment pipelines for our customers.” By working together, mogenius and Cloudflare provide optimization and automation at every layer of cloud development infrastructure.