EcoOnline is a global company with over 10.000 customers that develops and provides systems for managing EHS initiatives.
The company is continuously modernizing its AWS environment together with its partner Orange Business. The ongoing cloud journey is a strategic necessity to improve commercial competitiveness. Despite significant optimizing efforts, EcoOnline’s AWS usage has grown with around 80% (from July 2022 to July 2023). Their key priorities encompass scalable, modular, and compliant infrastructure solutions such as the usage of microservices, serverless and purpose-built architectures, including best practices.
The Case Challenge: EcoOnline has been running cross-cloud for different applications. They are consolidating these to get better control over deployment and configuration. One of these services is the Crawler service that was running a manually configured Docker image and it’s used for gathering chemical safety data from the web. To make the service more stable and easier to manage, a two-step project was initiated to migrate the Crawler service to AWS Fargate. The build process is done using standard CI/CD pipelines. The second step is to migrate the container to a fully serverless solution using AWS Lambda and SQS.
The Crawler application is developed in Node.js and it uses a headless chrome instance to download updated safety sheet data from different vendors. The application maintains an internal queue, and all processing is handled within the application. The resulting safety sheets are stored in EFS and is available for EcoOnline’s other SaaS applications like Chemical Safety.
As a part of the migration to AWS a pipeline to handle both Build and Deployment of the application has been set up. The existing pipeline pattern used for other containerized services in EcoOnline is reused, and Orange Business assisted EcoOnline to set up a “Build once, Deploy many” pattern. Deployment is done to existing ECS Fargate clusters and load balancing infrastructure.
The final step of the project is to do a full rewrite. This will be a green-field project, where Orange Business will work together with EcoOnline in refactoring the solution.
In addition, Orange Business has set up monitoring of the application in its current form using CloudWatch metrics and Datadog patterns to pick up tracing and logging of the Crawler service.
EcoOnline also benefits from Orange Business’ Managed Services such as Cloud Essentials and Cloud Foundation with its secure and scalable Landing Zone.
The migration to AWS of the Crawler service will help EcoOnline to gain better control of the application’s development speed, stability, security and costs.
- Faster and standardized workflow for development of the Crawler service.
- No transfer cost between cloud platforms. All processing takes place in AWS.
- Better scalability. Infrastructure is no longer dependent on manually maintained container backend.
- Increased logging and monitoring of Crawler service enabling development teams to find issues faster.
- By migration to a fully serverless pattern, the cost will be greatly reduced as the service is event triggered.
