Leap with Ibrahim "Abe" Ahmed

Leap is an API for generative AI that uses Zeet as their developer platform. Zeet provides them with the ability to manage their infrastructure, scale their ML/AI offerings with GPU access through Zeet’s multi-cloud capabilities, and configure everything with Zeet’s easy-to-use UI and API.

What’s unique about this, is Leap has 3 different cloud providers, 4 Kubernetes clusters, a dozen different apps and services running, and up to a million concurrent API requests—all with no DevOps team. In fact, their team consists of 3 people, and only 1 of them is a full time developer.

By using Zeet, Leap has been able to run their tech stack without the need for an infrastructure team, without ever having to worry about managing their cloud infrastructure, and they’re doing so while saving time and money on all of their cloud operations.

Leap is a company that specializes in generative AI, providing an API for developers to easily integrate generative models into their applications. They have a small but mighty team of 3, with one dedicated engineer and two generalists, but they don't have any dedicated infrastructure engineers on their team.

Before using Zeet, Leap was running their tech stack on AWS, which provided them with the cloud infrastructure they needed to run their frontend, backend, and public API. This was working for them, but they have a unique problem: they also need GPUs.

Being an AI company, and an API, they have the unique problem of both needing horsepower, and needing it at scale. With AWS, they had to choose: high power GPUs with minimum availability, or operate at a lower capacity. That was, until they found Zeet.

It was no longer a compromise, and beyond that, they didn’t need to hire an infrastructure engineer to create and maintain their infrastructure. They clicked a few buttons, and they were done.

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“Having an IDP allows us to focus on hiring product engineers, not DevOps. We anticipate it’ll be quite a while before we need to hire someone to focus on infrastructure. As CTO, I still have enough time to deal with our infrastructure needs thanks to Zeet.” Ibrahim Ahmed, CTO, Leap API

With Zeet, your engineering team specifies what they need, and Zeet figures out the most effective, cheapest way to fulfill it. Need GPUs? Here’s a cloud purpose-built to give you access to hundreds of SKUs, at a scale that can handle enterprise volumes. Need a front-end? Point at your nextJS (or any other framework!) project repository and let Zeet host it. Database? Load Balancer? Literally any IaC package? Zeet will deploy it and manage it.

Before Zeet, Leap explored several other solutions, including hiring 1-2 dedicated infrastructure engineers and using other platforms like Google Cloud and Azure. However, they found that these solutions were either too expensive, or didn't provide them with the flexibility they needed. Beyond that, they still needed to write code.

Like any growing software company, Leap needed to continually ship new features, fix bugs, and create value. Most companies in this position might just choose a PaaS, but given Leap’s GPU needs and scale, a PaaS would make sense neither functionally, nor financially.

That was why Leap adopted Zeet. Zeet provides all of the functionality of a PaaS (CI/CD, access to cloud infrastructure, deployment management, etc.), but with the added capability of managing that cloud infrastructure across YOUR clouds. Gain all the benefits of using purpose-built clouds, with all the cost savings of avoiding PaaS markups.

In Leap’s case this meant a 900% increase in software deployments, virtually unlimited access to GPUs to scale their value delivery to customers, and a six-figure saving on engineering talent and cloud expenses.

The Leap team found it easy to onboard with Zeet. Zeet's user-friendly interface allowed them to stand up their entire tech stack with virtually 0 downtime, including their front-end and back-end, public API, and modeling/AI infrastructure.

After onboarding period, their time to first deployment was less than 1 hour, and the benefits of Zeet became immediately clear:

• They could use cloud credits they had access to across providers, saving them on their cloud bill
• The ease of deployments, with a 900% increase in Deployments in the first 6 months
• They could finally scale by simply making an API call to configure more GPUs. No more speed limit on growth.
• Spinning up clusters to serve different regions was now a few button clicks

Leap got more productive, less constrained, and fully in control of both their software and infrastructure, all while saving time on cloud management and deployments, and money on cloud costs and engineering horsepower.

“The barrier to entry to deploying, updating, or even monitoring a new service has gone down significantly with Zeet. Which means a lot of team members who might have been intimidated by the life cycle of their code are now very eager to see their code reach production. They feel empowered, and they not only own what they ship, but they are able to have a much larger impact because of it.” Ibrahim Ahmed, CTO, Leap API

Life after onboarding to Zeet has been smooth sailing. Leap manages their entire tech stack from Zeet, and they trust Zeet to scale with their business. But don’t take our word for it.

What do you think would happen if Elon Musk replied to your tweet? Well, Leap found out first hand—it would 100,000x your start-up’s request volume. Want to know how Leap handled this? They made 1 API call to Zeet, and they shut their laptops. You read that right.

Leap made a single API call to Zeet to recruit more GPUs for the volume they were experiencing, and that was it. Zeet integrated the GPUs into Leap’s cluster, handled all of the load balancing, and gave Leap the peace of mind to not worry about infrastructure.

“Cloud providers are trying to serve all use-cases, where most teams need just a few services a cloud platform offers. Having a developer platform makes it easy to use just what we need, it saves us time, it prevents us from making mistakes, and it gives me confidence that my team is empowered to experiment without breaking anything.

We’ve essentially created guardrails now. If we were to put our developers in our cloud environment, they might not know what to do, or accidentally break something. With Zeet, it’s easy to give developers access to cloud operations, without navigating the complex RBAC of each cloud provider” Ibrahim Ahmed, CTO, Leap API

Leap doesn’t think about infrastructure or DevOps. They write code, they grow their business, they spend money on serving more users, not infrastructure engineers. Leap uses 2 clouds, with 3 clusters spread across them, and they have 0 infrastructure engineers managing them. They have Zeet for infrastructure, they have Zeet for deployments, and they have Zeet for everything in between.