Automating DevOps:
How Freshmile saves time by freeing its teams from complex DevOps tasks

Electric vehicles have seen a significant rise in popularity in recent years, as more and more consumers are opting for environmentally friendly transportation options. With such a growth of electric vehicles adoption, there comes a challenge of providing the adequate infrastructure for their operations.

This challenge was accepted by Freshmile over 10 years ago now, and it’s been the first independent operator in France!

We recently had the opportunity to interview Florent Poujol, Production Manager at Freshmile, and Michel Gassmann, their Chief Marketing Officer, to better understand their activity, and how Freshmile is managing an entire network of charging stations for electric vehicles in Europe.

In this customer case, you will discover what Freshmile is about, and how they are using Scalingo to operate their activity.

Freshmile: Making electric driving easy and accessible

Freshmile was founded in 2010 by Arnaud Mora, and it’s been since then an important actor in the electric vehicles (EV) charging services in France, and now in Europe.

With references such as BMW, Lidl, Renault Waze and more, the company offers a range of services to support the adoption and use of EVs, including charging infrastructure installation, supervision, maintenance, and billing. The company acts as a CPO (Charge Point Operator) when it comes to managing the charging point, but it also handles the role of an EMP (Electric Mobility Service Provider) and guide EV drivers.

Freshmile also provides a mobile app for EV drivers, which allows them to locate and access charging stations, view real-time availability and pricing information, and pay for charging sessions.

Freshmile’s mission is to provide the necessary infrastructure to support the rise of EV, all while making the process of EV charging convenient, reliable and affordable for all drivers. And all of this is done by offering a set of various services for both EV drivers and owners of the charging stations.

As of today, 200 000 charging stations are accessible through the Freshmile for EV drivers all across Europe, and 200 000 users are trusting the company for their everyday charging needs.

A peek into Freshmile’s technical development process

During our interview with Florent and Michel, we’ve learned a lot about how Freshmile operates behind the scenes. We will give you a glimpse on how things work from a technical point of view, and share what we learned about their operations.

Freshmile is hosting in total 18 production and staging apps in total on Scalingo, within these apps, the majority production apps, with 3 of them being the primary backend apps: Park, Move and OCPP-J on the following diagram.

“Park” and “OCPP-J” are the two apps that are connected to the charging stations, whereas “Move” acts as the back-end app to the front-end apps.

The front-end includes the “Charge” app, the mobile apps, and another 6 various apps. In total, 10 production apps are hosted on Scalingo.

And on the staging side of things, Freshmile hosts 6 apps that act as a mirror to the main production apps.

They are using mainly PHP and VueJS technologies, and MySQL and Redis for their databases.

In the past, Freshmile were hosting their apps on OVH, but decided to find another cloud hosting provider after realizing that their needs evolved and that due to their growth, scalability became one of their main priorities.

While rewriting some of their apps, Freshmile developers started looking into a new hosting solution, and discovered Scalingo. In June 2020, they decided to transition to the Scalingo PaaS.

Since then, their technical team had the opportunity to experiment with our platform, and we took the opportunity to gather their feedback to better understand the benefits of Scalingo for Freshmile.

Scaling up Freshmile’s capabilities with Scalingo

The main reasons for Freshmile’s team to switch from their previous hosting provider to Scalingo was due to the rewriting of some of their apps, and the need of scalability to support their growth.

Now that they’ve been using our PaaS platform for over two years, these are the main benefits that Florent and Michel brought to us during our interview with them.

Scaling with no downtime

As mentioned earlier, scaling became for Freshmile a priority in order to keep up with their growth.

In the interview, we understood that the developers at Freshmile have found in Scalingo what they were looking for, an easy and efficient way to scale depending on their needs.

Florent and Michel, explained to us that scaling with no downtime in a single click made the scaling task easy and fast to handle. It seems to be especially useful in their use case when it comes to scaling their databases. This allows them to avoid transferring hundreds of gigabytes manually all while having no downtime.

They also use the autoscaling feature on one of their main front-end apps, and enjoy the freedom of scaling manually for the others.

Competent support

Getting in touch with Scalingo’s technical support team is a very important aspect for Freshmile’s team.

As Florent explained to us, contacting support is a process that always goes smoothly with Scalingo. Whenever they have an issue with their apps or their databases, support comes in with helpful information allowing them to fix it quickly, avoiding any extra hassle.

DevOps made easy

Freshmile team has no internal DevOps dedicated, in fact it’s one of the reasons why they chose to use Scalingo.

Using our PaaS allows them to externalize any painful DevOps tasks. Everything is handled automatically by the platform, and the only job that Freshmile’s team has is to choose their containers and databases, and Scalingo manages everything else!

This allows our users to free up on average 20% of their tech team capacity, all while speeding up their deployments processes and their productivity.

The European PaaS magic

One of the first things that were mentioned during the interview on why Scalingo was selected as the new hosting provider was the fact that it’s a PaaS platform, and it’s a French one!

Florent explained to us that as a company, Freshmile was looking for an optimal hosting solution, and that making sure that their data was hosted in France was an important deciding factor for them.

In fact, data location and privacy is essential for them, and Scalingo checked their needs in terms of confidentiality.

It is now even more the case, especially since that our platform became recently the first European PaaS to get certified ISO 27001 and HDS (Health Data Hosting).

To recap

Freshmile handles over 25 000 charging stations and thanks to the interoperability with other networks over 200 000 stations are available to their users all across Europe.

All of this is done through 18 apps that are hosted on Scalingo, with two of them being the principal apps to handle the charging station and the mobile apps.

For them, using Scalingo PaaS helps them on a daily basis to handle quick deployments, effective automatic scaling, and all of that with no downtime and no painful DevOps tasks.

Scalingo being a European PaaS with certified datacenters in France and in house support brings an extra added value that makes their everyday missions easier and more efficient.

Curious about Scalingo or want to learn more? Feel free to book a demo with us!