Migrating a Cloud Broker from a Monolithic to Microservices Architecture

Challenge

Monolithic applications are one of the main roadblocks to effective legacy system modernization. Our client was struggling to determine the best technical solution for decoupling and subsequent re-hosting and re-platforming. They had already attempted migration using another vendor who, unfortunately, could not deliver on its promises. The client was left with 50 de-coupled application programming interfaces (APIs) that were not properly configured for error handling, logging, and monitoring.

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

“We received significantly higher quality advice, development, and QA from Edvantis than our previous off-shore team. The difference was clear within the first month.”

Head of Product & Engineering

Technologies Used

Python, Flask, MySQL, Amazon Redshift, AWS Serverless

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.