Caylent Services
AWS Foundations & Migrations
From rehosting to replatforming to rearchitecting, Caylent will help you leverage AWS to its fullest potential to meet your business objectives.
Enterprise productivity software company lowers costs by 40% with AWS migration
40%
Infrastructure Cost Savings
LaunchNotes successfully migrated their infrastructure to AWS, resulting in enhanced performance and efficiency, improved team confidence in managing infrastructure, and up to 40% lower costs!
LaunchNotes is an enterprise productivity software company that aims to streamline communication between disparate teams within organizations and with their customers. They offer a product management platform for product and customer-facing teams to interact with customer feedback, manage roadmaps, and publish product release announcements. LaunchNotes also provides a publishable page where organizations can showcase product launches, their roadmap, and features they’re considering building. LaunchNotes puts this feature into action on their own product updates page to create greater transparency and engagement with its user base.
Challenge
Prior to the AWS migration, LaunchNotes' infrastructure, hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), was predominantly manually managed. The lack of infrastructure as code (IaC) and limited documentation stifled the team’s ability to address customers’ needs and issues efficiently due to challenges with fully understanding the infrastructure and its underlying issues. This approach resulted in over-provisioning, performance issues, and a lack of clarity during incidents.
These infrastructure issues resulted in undesirable resource wastage, costly inefficiencies in provisioning, and valuable development time lost in troubleshooting. LaunchNotes decided to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address these challenges. This strategic decision was influenced by various factors, including AWS's robust support infrastructure, superior feature set, funding programs, and customer service. For implementation, LaunchNotes wanted a technical partner that had the depth of expertise to execute the migration, while also enabling the LaunchNotes development team with the knowledge to thrive with their new infrastructure.
"It really felt like Caylent was an extension of the team, even during the planning process, before we had signed anything. I've worked with plenty of contractors in the past and it seems like Caylent has perfected that ability to add capacity to your team with minimal friction. They truly worked towards our goals, not just the scope articulated in our SOW."
Salvatore Sodano
Director of Software Engineering
Solution
Partnering with Caylent, LaunchNotes was able to migrate their infrastructure to AWS within 6 weeks. The move to AWS allowed for a more intentional and systematic setup using Terraform for IaC, ensuring better scalability, cost-efficiency, and a more organized approach to DevOps. This also introduced predictability and improved documentation for infrastructure management. Caylent's expertise further facilitated a smooth transition with a detailed migration plan and robust support during the cut-over process.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Detailed migration planning with Caylent's expertise.
- Establishment of separate environments for different workloads.
- Implementation of private VPCs and enhanced security measures.
- Cross-region Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) strategy
- Adoption of AWS's advanced tools for better performance and security.
Results
The migration to AWS brought forth significant benefits for LaunchNotes:
- A substantial reduction in cloud expenses by approximately 35-40%.
- Streamlined and more efficient incident management, reducing downtime and improving reliability.
- Enhanced security and observability, with separate clusters for production and development workloads.
- Enhanced team knowledge and confidence, especially in AWS, IaC, and DevOps practices.
- Improved scalability and predictability in their infrastructure management.
- The ability to leverage AWS's diverse service offerings for future expansions and optimizations.
The team at LaunchNotes expressed high satisfaction with the migration process, particularly noting the seamless integration of Caylent's team into their operations, which felt like a natural extension of their own team. The project's success instilled a newfound confidence in their DevOps capabilities and set a solid foundation for future growth. Looking ahead, LaunchNotes plans to further integrate AWS services into its infrastructure, enhancing its ability to manage larger scales of operation and customer demands efficiently.
LaunchNotes' migration to AWS, assisted by Caylent, marked a crucial step in their growth and development. The transition not only provided financial benefits and enhanced performance but also empowered the team with greater awareness, insight, and confidence in managing their infrastructure.
This project exemplifies how strategic infrastructure changes can significantly impact a company's operational efficiency and scalability.
