KnackForge
Building Comprehensive Application Development Partnerships

A visit to KnackForge’s office premises in India during their hiring process portrays the firm’s relentless quest to find a top-notch coder. The nuances of a potential prospect’s practical skills and knowledge are analyzed under considerable scrutiny and evaluated before hiring. “The aim here is to hire executives who can code while sleeping,” highlights Jeff Strout, the CEO at KnackForge. Next, the firm pairs the selected talent with a business analyst in the U.S. who has excellent communication skills. Together, they form an impeccable combination to improve the processes and technologies of Small- and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) by leveraging solutions provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The firm puts special emphasis on the three elements—people, processes, and tools—to define every engagement that they employ with their clients. KnackForge injects its formula in its service delivery which encompasses DevOps and design-thinking for their clients, helping companies control costs, and access the right development talent.

KnackForge takes a condensed agile methodology to deliver their software development expertise. To align their client’s business goals with their services, the firm assigns a business relationship manager who initiates the discovery phase and understands the client’s existing architecture and business requirements. A project plan is then created, which is broken down into milestones. Once the design plan is finalized, KnackForge begins the execution phase through their business relationship manager and development lead. “All the source code that the team works on, along with their project deliverables is checked into GitHub, and for communication, we use Slack and HipChat,” adds Jeff. The whole deployment is run through a continuous integration pipeline using AWS as the infrastructure framework, which injects DevOps in the firm’s processes, culture, and tools. At the intersection of being a huge AWS shop and having a competitive advantage in the financial banking, investment banking, e-commerce, and digital marketing markets, the company ensures its clients get the best of both worlds.

DevOps for KnackForge is not a goal but a never ending process of continual development

KnackForge’s services include cloud computing and infrastructure, web application development, cross-platform mobile app development, staff augmentation and dedicated teams, consulting services, and enterprise data warehouse and data mining.

As the implementation starts to take shape, the team checks the product development’s progress toward reaching a certain milestone. Various quality tests are carried out by the firm’s quality assurance team, development lead, and business relationship manager to validate the development. Further, the firm supports their client after the product delivery with their ongoing support services.

Having evolved alongside Amazon over the years, the firm has helped many clients reduce overhead and improve reliability with AWS. In terms of reporting, KnackForge leverages AWS CloudWatch to provide monitoring for an application. “We commonly integrate the following technology into our services: Amazon API Gateway, EC2, RDS, Redshift, S3, ElastiCache, IAM, SES, and CloudWatch,” mentions Jeff. The firm’s AWS development services are leveraged by many startups, small businesses, and large enterprises to launch applications quickly, scale rapidly, and enjoy high performance at a controlled cost.

Being a global organization provides KnackForge with the flexibility to cater its AWS services to their clients in the U.S. and other countries including Spain. Jeff informs that though their primary market will remain the U.S., they plan on targeting the Singapore market in the near future. “We are a multi-national company with an aim to evolve along with the industry keeping our flexibility and agility intact,” concludes Jeff.