Migration and Managed Services to offload the DevOps team
In an increasingly digital and rapidly changing world students all over the world have embraced online and digital content as a smart way to reduce costs and to be efficient when studying. Allvit AS is a company that provides digital learning solutions to students in Norway. The company started their cloud journey with Orange Business as their trusted MSP partner during spring 2022. The starting point of this DevOps collaboration was a business-critical migration project of a digital product/solution.
About the Customer
The company Allvit AS delivers digital syllabus books online in PDF and EPUB format to give students an easier and more efficient study day. Allvit books weigh nothing, and you can take own notes, highlight as much as you want, search directly in the books and copy out paragraphs – all in one place. The company was founded in 2019, has 10 employees and the headquarter is located in Trondheim, Norway.
The Case Challenge: Allvit had acquired a digital product/solution from another company and needed AWS experiences and knowledges to support migration of the acquired data, applications, and other services into a brand-new AWS environment. Consequently, if this challenge was not addressed, the company couldn’t offer the product/solution to its users and customers. In addition, Allvit have few DevOps resources and is dependent on continuous support from a partner to keep the environment in a secure and cost-efficient mode.
Partner Solution
Allvit needed to re-implement the existing solution in a new AWS environment and migrate all user data to be able to continue the underlaying operations of the product/solution. Once migrated, the customer maintains and deploys applications in the solution. In addition, Orange Business’ Managed Services plays a significant role for the DevOps efforts. The basic services Cloud Essentials, Cloud Foundation and 3rd party Datadog products form the security and FinOps baseline where 24/7 monitoring is included.
The customer’s AWS environment consists mainly of Frontend and Backend microservices deployed on ECS Fargate (behind Application Load Balancers for public-facing services). AWS services, such as S3 for storing content, CloudFront for CDN, SQS for inter-service communication, Aurora RDS as a primary databases solution, Cognito for user authentication and federation to other login services, such as Google, Facebook and Feide and Simple Email Service for receipts and user-management work as supporting resources to the ECS Fargate solution.
Orange Business has an existing customer relationship with the company that previously owned the product/solution acquired by Allvit. Hence, we had specific knowledge of the structure of the solution. Leveraging Orange Business knowledge of that and the advantages of an existing IaC defined as modularized Terraform code, we were able to get Allvit up and running rapidly.
Results and Benefits
The entire migration and the setup of the Managed Services only took 3 months to complete. Hence, Allvit now has an individual adapted AWS environment with development, stage and production accounts.
Moreover, Orange Business has made Allvit’s DevOps practices more effectively where developers can focus on core competencies, drive innovation, and deliver value to their customers.
Allvit’s AWS environment is protected by a baseline security solution, i.e. Orange Business Landing Zone, included in the Cloud Foundation service. The Landing Zone is built on best practice and it enables the customer to scale without risk to lose the control over the security requirements.
Orange Business Managed Services enables DevOps and Security teams to easily access a broad set of AWS knowledges in one place. As part of the Managed Services agreement a Customer team is appointed to serve Allvit to ensure consultants with domain specific skills are available for projects, requests and troubleshooting. The Customer team has in close collaboration with Allvit reduced the consumption costs with 19%, from June 2022 to June 2023.