Migrating a Cloud Broker from a Monolithic to Microservices Architecture

About the Client

Our client offers a cutting-edge software platform and methodology for data collection and analysis, providing insights into internet-connected infrastructure through publicly available data. Their platform uses advanced DevOps technology to provide corporate clients with actionable intelligence, standing out from traditional survey-based data providers.

Challenge

Monolithic applications often pose significant challenges to effective legacy system modernization. One of our clients faced difficulties in identifying the optimal technical approach for decoupling, re-hosting, and re-platforming their systems. Previously, they partnered with a different vendor for their migration project, but the results did not meet expectations. This left them with 50 decoupled application programming interfaces (APIs) that lacked proper configurations for error handling, logging, and monitoring, creating further complications in their modernization journey.

Edvantis was chosen because of our team’s established expertise with Python, MySQL databases, and AWS serverless computing.

Solution

By augmenting the client’s in-house team with three Software Developers and a QA Engineer, Edvantis got the project back on track and led it to successful closure.

The client had initially deployed Kubernetes clusters on top of several E2C instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a sub-optimally configured E2C auto-scaling group. This setup made the cloud infrastructure inefficient and hard to manage. Therefore, one of our primary goals was to move the client away from Kubernetes hosting to cloud-native, serverless architecture.

Why Go Serverless

The AWS serverless application model enables you to develop modern, agile applications that consume fewer resources and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the deployed solutions. The main advantage of serverless architecture is that it eliminates common infrastructure management tasks such as server/cluster provisioning, OS maintenance, and patching.

Building serverless applications means that your Software Developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on the premises. With reduced overheads, Software Developers can focus on developing new reliable, scalable products, while AWS handles capacity and resource provisioning for applications and backend services.

As part of the larger migration from monolithic to microservices, our team also helped the client improve their continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) process. To speed up delivery, we switched from Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines and incorporated additional integration pre-deployment testing.

Results

Edvantis helped the client migrate from a monolithic system to microservices and subsequently to serverless, reducing their infrastructure hosting costs by 60%.

Edvantis also helped the client roll out an integrated Python-based bill reporting dashboard in the new serverless environment with drill-down and near real-time capabilities. The introduction of the new billing solution to the 20+ end users resulted in a significant decrease in procurement time and costs.