Migrating and Modernising Infoxchange’s Critical Services for Australians
Cevo was engaged by Infoxchange to help modernise their previously complex, on-premises environment built on Kubernetes. Cevo’s expert AWS skills and knowledge enabled Infoxchange to deliver a reliable, scalable and cost effective platform that provides life-changing services to Australians that need them most, now and into the future.
300%
Application performance improvement
Modernise
Cevo NexusTM solution
Not-for-profit
Industry
Infoxchange is a not-for-profit social enterprise that has been delivering technology for social justice for over 30 years, with products and services used by more than 35,000 government and community services. Infoxchange works with community, government and corporate partners to solve issues around homelessness, family violence, mental health and disability, in addition to supporting Indigenous communities, women, youth and families.
Business challenge
Infoxchange was operating a complex, custom, on-premises environment for two of its key applications: Service Directory, Australia’s most comprehensive and up-to-date health and community services directory, and Ask Izzy, a website that connects people in crisis with support services relevant to their needs.
This was presenting a number of challenges in terms of scalability, availability, security, and attracting skilled talent. With a heavy dependence on the internal systems team to manage and support the underlying infrastructure including a Kubernetes cluster, the organisation was limited in its ability to scale quickly and cost effectively. Infoxchange was seeking a solution to leverage modern, secure and scalable technologies to reduce this knowledge-specific workload and open the door to more innovative, agile and secure operations, however lacked the internal capacity to do so. The resiliency of the services is critical due to the services being utilised 24×7 to connect people in need of housing, family violence, a warm meal or other unexpected hardship requests.
Solution
Infoxchange opted for an iterative and strategic approach to their migration. In collaboration with Cevo consultants, they began by implementing a replica of their existing disaster recovery functionality in AWS, which not only stored backups but also provided the necessary capacity, retention policies and data sovereignty to effectively operate their services. This removed the need to refresh their existing hardware and allowed them to test their services in the AWS environment, gaining confidence in operating their workloads in AWS cloud. As all data must be kept within Australia, AWS policies to limit this were also introduced.
With this solid foundation in place, Infoxchange and Cevo began their modernisation planning with the initial build of the AWS platform using AWS Control Tower, account provisioning and the implementation of AWS Transit Gateway to establish the core network required to support the workloads. The primary focus of this design was to simplify the operation of the environment, leverage cloud managed services to reduce the heavy lifting, and ensure an improved experience for development teams, eliminating any single point sensitivity between teams.
To proactively equip the Infoxchange team with the necessary skills and knowledge required to operate effectively, Cevo ran weekly training sessions during the next phase of the migration. Cevo’s consultants also hosted a ‘Game Day’ to simulate likely scenarios, allowing the team to gain confidence in operating securely and meet their required SLAs for client agreements.
In order to migrate from their on-premises Kubernetes cluster, Cevo’s consultants supported Infoxchange to develop a wrapper that streamlined the configuration process for more than 250 workloads. This wrapper allowed for easy customisation of parameters and deployment options, enabling a seamless deployment to AWS ECS Fargate using a highly available resilient pattern. To support the deployment stages and components, Cevo’s consultants also implemented pipelines in GitHub, providing a robust and efficient framework.
Throughout the migration, security was prioritised by implementing a three-tier architecture for the workloads. This includes the use of separate virtual private clouds (VPCs) and an AWS Transit Gateway to segment access, responsibilities and management to increase the overall security posture.
Following the migration, Cevo’s consultants diligently conducted Well-Architected Reviews on key workloads. This allowed Cevo to provide additional confirmation of the design and validate its effectiveness, identify areas for further improvement and create a backlog of tasks aimed at optimising their AWS environment and ensuring ongoing success.
Infoxchange experienced an immediate improvement in performance following the migration from their previous on-premises Kubernetes environment to AWS. As seen in the image below, Infoxchange observed a significant decrease in latency after the cutover at 2pm.
Infoxchange is now actively exploring the next steps to further capitalise on AWS native services, such as serverless computing and event-driven architectures, and continuing to review the performance of their applications to right-size their services for optimised infrastructure, scalability and cost efficiency.
“Infoxchange’s migration to AWS has been a huge success, and working with dedicated and committed people at Cevo has been a rewarding experience. The Cevo team have operated as an extension of our DevOps operation, creating one big collaborative team, all working hard towards the same goal, and that’s been the key to our success. The result is a smooth cutover to AWS, with applications performing at a higher level than on-prem and with greater levels of visibility to support and maintain our workloads. This is the beginning of a new journey into a much wider technology platform and the Infoxchange team are excited to start innovating.”
Alison Ramsay
Head of Technology, Infoxchange
Outcomes
This migration has resulted in significant benefits for Infoxchange, impacting various aspects of their operations, including:
- Security – Enabled key security functions as a service, so development teams can now securely manage their own certificates using AWS Certificate Manager and Route53 for DNS entries without the need to engage other teams.
- Performance – Demonstrated 3x improvement in the performance of applications, translating to a more seamless user experience and increased operational efficiency.
- Reliability – The use of infrastructure as code has instilled confidence in the repeatability and reliability of the systems across environments, ensuring consistent and predictable outcomes required to provide technology for social justice.
- Reliability – Leveraging a consistent highly available pattern that uses all 3 AZs to operate the workloads, provides resiliency to ensure services meet required SLAs. This has uplifted the resiliency of the services inline with the business demand to ensure people in need can access these services 24×7.
- Operational excellence – Infoxchange witnessed a 75% reduction in the number of database clusters required for production. By leveraging AWS RDS Aurora services, they have significantly reduced the operational overhead associated with managing core database services, allowing them to focus on delivering value for their end users.
- Observability – By migrating their code to AWS Fargate, Infoxchange has taken advantage of out-of-the-box metrics, significantly increasing the visibility of individual workloads compared to their on-premises Kubernetes cluster. This has allowed developers to see how their code is performing, enabling them to make informed decisions and quickly identify and address performance issues, which was previously infeasible.
This engagement has ultimately improved Infoxchange’s agility in responding to demand fluctuations and has allowed the organisation to focus on delivering life-changing services to Australians that need them most.
“This migration project represents the single largest strategic investment in Infoxchange’s long history of delivering core tech solutions for the NGO sector over the past 25 years. The collaboration with Cevo fast-tracked our ability to make the shift and enabled us to embed the knowledge needed to not only take the reins post-deployment but, importantly, kick off some key innovation projects immediately. A big thank you to the collaboration with the Cevo team, who really understood our mission, the impact we make and the risks that needed to be managed.”
Brian McLaughlin
COO, Infoxchange
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