Customer Case Study

Jasper’s Agile DevOps Strategy Relies on Engineers Having Instant Access to Resources via Teleport

Jasper.ai has helped to accelerate content development for leading companies across a variety of industries. The platform's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities help to improve copywriting and art development, while also enhancing search engine optimization. As a result, Jasper has become a go-to solution for businesses looking to improve their content marketing efforts.

***We liked Jasper.ai so much, we used it to write this case study!

The solution helps customers overcome writer's block by pulling in data and ideas from foundational content to bring writers closer to a finished article, blog, social media post and more. Its AI technology allows users to issue intuitive commands that quickly generate copy according to the creator's preferences, such as style, tone, and audience. This makes it easier for authors to target content and perform well across digital channels. For this case study, we uploaded a transcript of a customer interview that we did with the Jasper.ai team and voila, the case study practically wrote itself!

Arrows pointing towards the word audience on a whiteboard

One of the ways that Jasper software engineers stay ahead of competing solutions is by continually delivering new product enhancements. These enhancements improve the quality of outputs and make customer experiences better and more intuitive. This commitment to innovation ensures that Jasper remains at the forefront of the artificial intelligence industry.

The nature of our business is that we are always delivering new enhancements, like our AI image generator, Art. Building cutting-edge solutions requires that our staff always has access to the resources they need with very few barriers to productivity. We needed agile access and this is how we got to know Teleport.

Guhan Venguswamy

Head of Platform Engineering, Jasper

Jasper enterprise illustration

From the ground up

I was brought on to build our infrastructure from the ground up, leveraging Kubernetes, a variety of web apps, databases, and Google Cloud. I had experience with Teleport at a prior organization and knew that I wanted to use it from the start of the project to tie together all of our infrastructure and provide all of our teams access. It helps simplify what could be complicated.

John Baird

Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Jasper

Jasper uses Teleport to provide web app access for technical and non-technical users alike. Any member of the Jasper DevOps team gets instant access to cloud-native apps like Argo, Kafka Owl, Kubernetes clusters and databases, accelerating their work.

Teleport's Application Access helps Jasper engineers share work in real time with non-technical stakeholders. Internal web applications are exposed and secured through Teleport. This allows a seamless integration with Teleport for authentication and authorization. Teleport supports the use of JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) that provides authenticated user and role information for mapping identity between Teleport and web applications, including automatic user sign-in.

By exposing web applications for each development environment, Teleport Application Access enables Jasper engineers to simply give non-technical users a URL to access the web app. This allows the user to access the custom application without having to have GitHub or Google Cloud access or skills. This also enables users to access private or custom applications that are not available through the company's SSO provider.

“In our design workflows, our engineers can just tell non-technical users, like a designer, to go visit a specific URL, where the person can see what changes have been made and provide feedback in real time,” says Venguswamy.

Rather than having to jump through hoops to give some individuals temporary access, we can offer instant access to those that need it with Teleport, we can be more collaborative, and deliver product enhancements faster.

Guhan Venguswamy

Head of Platform Engineering, Jasper

Similarly, Teleport allows for even more transparency and ease of access for engineers. A user only needs to log into Teleport one time, then they have instant access to all authorized infrastructure resources such as Kubernetes clusters and databases, even if connecting via native tools like kubectl, pgsql or other native clients.

For remote workers

Teleport has replaced the need for VPNs for engineers, as they can now access resources directly through the Teleport identity-native proxy. The company operates entirely in the cloud and does not rely on traditional hardware infrastructure. This has improved workflows, as developers no longer need to worry about logging in via VPN or being physically on-site in an office. Additionally, Teleport is lighter weight and more robust than other solutions, enhancing remote management.

Teleport has been a lifesaver for our remote workers, It provides secure access to our infrastructure without the need for a VPN. This has eliminated the headaches of having to manage VPNs for each individual user.

Guhan Venguswamy

Head of Platform Engineering, Jasper

Image of a remote meeting on Zoom

Jasper has continued to grow and support remote access, even as COVID-19 and other business challenges have pushed the company to pivot with how it structures its organization. Being able to work remotely has been a lifesaver for many team members, and Teleport has been instrumental in making that possible.

Rapid scaling

“In March of 2022, I came on board. By the end of the year, the engineering team will have grown from 5 employees to more than 70,” says Baird. “The engineering team is projected to continue growing in the coming years. Using Teleport, we can continue to support growth with rapid onboarding, with a minimal operational footprint, helping to ensure the right individuals have the right access.”

Image of people working in an office

Additionally, the company appreciates how Teleport has accelerated onboarding and sped up deploying dev environments for new employees. With enhanced onboarding workflows, new employees can go from having a barebones laptop to having a dev environment with all the correct access deployed inside of 30 minutes to an hour.

Previously, we had to manually provision credentials for new users. This process was time-consuming and prone to error. Teleport has helped us automate this process, which has saved us time and improved accuracy, especially in an environment where things are always rapidly changing.

John Baird

Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Jasper

Screenshot of Jasper application

At the same time, the company can rapidly scale its platforms to support ever-changing business needs.

I think one interesting thing about our architecture is that we feel really comfortable scaling by quickly adding new tools when the need arises since Teleport makes it really easy to manage access, permissions and audit. This allows us to easily split larger services into microservices because the headache of providing access to the appropriate environments and resources is something that we don't have to worry about with Teleport in place.

Guhan Venguswamy

Head of Platform Engineering, Jasper

About the customer:

Jasper is a leading-edge content development platform which relies on artificial intelligence to accelerate copywriting and art development using intuitive commands. In addition to speeding up content development, the platform helps to enhance search engine optimization and improve content performance via digital channels.

Geo

Austin, TX

Vertical

AI/Content Development

Employees

100+

  • Challenges
  • Accelerate delivery of enhancements to AI content platform
  • Empower developers with instant access to devops environments to build new products and features faster
  • Support rapid scalability of a growing organization and IT infrastructure
  • Results
  • Increases security by eliminating the need for VPNs and giving developers the ability to access resources directly through the SSH gateway.
  • Supports faster development workflows by eliminating secrets without sacrificing security
  • Accelerates onboarding and deploying data spaces, making it easy to scale to support growing business needs