Ecowise - From AWS challenges to a stable and scalable solution

Modernizing and creating a stable platform for the future

Ecowise, which offers a system for managing quality management systems, ISO certification and documentation, among other things, faced a number of challenges in their existing AWS environment. Their application was running on an EC2 Classic instance with EBS as the main storage solution for documents in particular. When AWS announced that EC2 Classic would be phased out, Ecowise naturally recognized the need to take swift action.

At the same time, storage costs and the need for scalability for the growing system of uploaded documents were increasing and it was clear that a major modernization and restructuring of their environment was required. Ecowise knew they were not experts in this themselves, and wanted to focus their resources on product development rather than cloud management. At this point, they turned to adesso Sweden for expertise and guidance.

Time for a solution

To quickly resolve the most pressing issues, they started by migrating the MySQL database to Amazon Aurora to separate the installation of the application from the database and improve performance, and of course the application was moved from EC2 Classic to a modern infrastructure.

Subsequently, Amazon EFS was implemented for storing documents as a replacement for the previous EBS, which provided a significantly better cost picture for the future, but above all an immediate automatic scalability. These measures, of course, eliminated the fact that EC2 Classic had reached its End-of-Life, and ensured that there was no longer a need to manually provision storage space in advance.

Once the initial situation stabilized, we focused on the challenges ahead. The database versions used were also approaching end-of-life in support and development, requiring upgrades to their AWS environment and customizations to the application. An effort to upgrade databases and platforms to newer versions was started and at the same time the application was containerized to enable faster and more secure updates and to simplify deployment for the development team. Something that both ensures control over the development and production environment and at the same time ensures a functioning environment when the development team expands or changes.

"adesso Sweden helped us navigate through a critical phase in our AWS environment. Through their expertise, we have been able to modernize both our infrastructure and application, leading to a more scalable and secure solution. They have been a reliable partner throughout the process and we look forward to our continued collaboration."
- Finn Stillerud, CEO, Ecowise

Further development and improvements

In addition to the modernization work, work was also started on some further development of the platform towards a more cloud-native direction. This could be the first steps towards a new generation of the application.

For example, work has begun together with developers from adesso Sweden to improve security and meet customer requests. They are developing the application by separating authentication from the application and moving it to AWS. This enables the implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA), which will create a smoother and more secure experience for users.

Moving forward, work continues on modernizing the application as a whole. Future-proofing the codebase creates a platform that is easier to further develop and maintain, not only in terms of code, but also by improving the ability to find developers who are knowledgeable and skilled in the field if you want to expand your team.

Results and future opportunities

This collective effort has not only solved the initial problems and improved security, but also opened up future opportunities. By breaking down the application into microservices and possibly making it serverless, one would achieve even better performance, cost efficiency, reduced maintenance needs, and not least an opportunity to isolate, simplify and speed up further development and future integrations.

Together with the AWS team from adesso Sweden and with an ongoing review and management of the AWS environment, Ecowise can now be confident that their infrastructure is secure, stable and follows industry best practices. Future generations of the application have all the prerequisites to keep it at the forefront - again and again.