Zendesk keeps 200 engineers focused, productive and safe
In just 15 years, Zendesk grew from a startup to a $1.3 billion global leader in cloud-based customer service and support solutions. The SaaS vendor’s software engineering team relies on ngrok tunneling tools for secure remote access to local environments, boosting productivity and speeding software development.
Today our engineers spend less time troubleshooting proxy issues and more time building. ngrok allows our team to focus on delivering what matters for our customers by providing robust but simple identity integration that makes access management safer and easy to maintain.
Eliminating setup and troubleshooting hassles
As Zendesk grew, its global software engineering team faced time-consuming hassles of sharing, integrating, and validating apps being built on developer machines. The team regularly lost days of engineering effort with slow and unreliable tunneling tools that required a lot of troubleshooting on proxy issues and other manual work.
A group of about 10 engineers began using ngrok in 2015. Usage quickly spread as engineers found ngrok highly efficient, reliable, and simple to use, eliminating days of wasted effort. A new hire could be up and running on ngrok in just 15 minutes, while collaborators gained straightforward access to applications for testing and iteration.
“ngrok is a critical enabling tool for us,” says Wesley Gorman, senior director of engineering. “We can rely on ngrok working consistently, every day when we need it. That allows us to focus on delivering a great experience to our customers.”
20x user growth across a global infrastructure
Realizing dramatic gains in engineering productivity, Zendesk has expanded its ngrok user base 20x, from 10 to 200 engineers in locations including Melbourne, Montreal, Dublin, and Singapore. Now Zendesk’s global remote access standard for engineering, ngrok has proven to work robustly and seamlessly across a global infrastructure.
“ngrok delivers consistent low latency and high performance to our teams no matter where they are based," Gorman says. “This capability is only going to become more critical in a digital-first working world where our staff is going to be more widely dispersed."
Key Results
ngrok has been super user friendly. Our team has been able to automate setup and running as part of our engineers' development environment tooling. ngrok works seamlessly, supporting our work and never getting in the way.
