Opportunity
Firmway approached us to migrate their existing infrastructure from Amazon ECS to EKS while addressing several critical challenges that were impacting their operational efficiency and cost structure.
Manual Deployment Challenges: Their services were manually deployed without any CI/CD pipelines, creating significant operational overhead and increasing the risk of deployment errors. This manual process was slowing down their development cycles and reducing their ability to respond quickly to business needs.
Escalating Infrastructure Costs: The company was facing high infrastructure costs due to their reliance on AWS CloudWatch for logging, which was significantly expensive at scale. Additionally, their DocumentDB usage was costly and they were running on an outdated version that wasn't providing optimal performance or cost efficiency.
Lack of Cost Optimization: There was no utilization of spot instances or other cost optimization strategies, meaning they were paying premium prices for infrastructure that could be significantly more cost-effective.
Limited Operational Visibility: The lack of comprehensive monitoring and logging systems meant they had no meaningful insights into workload performance, making issue diagnosis difficult and preventing proactive problem resolution.
Disaster Recovery Risks: Perhaps most critically, they lacked a robust disaster recovery and high-availability plan, which posed serious risks of data loss and prolonged downtime in failure scenarios, potentially impacting business continuity.
Solution
To address Firmway's challenges and modernize their infrastructure, we implemented a comprehensive transformation strategy that prioritized cost optimization, operational efficiency, and system reliability.
Database Modernization and Optimization: We began with a complete overhaul of their database infrastructure, migrating from AWS DocumentDB to a self-hosted MongoDB solution on Kubernetes using the latest Helm charts for high availability. This transition not only reduced costs significantly but also provided access to the latest MongoDB features. We implemented read replicas to handle read-intensive workloads efficiently and established Velero for robust backup management with a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy, complemented by regular tabletop exercises to ensure preparedness.
Infrastructure as Code Implementation: We built the entire Kubernetes infrastructure using Terraform and Terragrunt, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability across all environments. This approach eliminated configuration drift and manual setup errors. We adopted GitOps practices with Flux for Kubernetes configuration and resource management, maintaining version-controlled infrastructure that enabled better collaboration and audit trails.
Automated CI/CD Pipeline Development: We established comprehensive GitLab CI/CD pipelines running on self-hosted runners, completely eliminating the manual deployment processes that were causing operational overhead. The pipelines utilized Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for image storage and implemented ECR pull-through cache to avoid Docker rate limits in CI/CD workflows, ensuring reliable and fast deployments.
Comprehensive Cost Optimization Strategy: Our cost optimization approach was multi-faceted, starting with a transition to ARM-based instances that achieved significant savings compared to Intel-based machines. We deployed the development environment on spot instances using Karpenter, leveraging dynamic scaling and cost reduction capabilities. Additionally, we implemented automated environment shutdowns during non-business hours, further reducing operational costs while maintaining full functionality during business operations.
Advanced Monitoring and Observability: We deployed Elasticsearch and Kibana for centralized logging, accessible securely over a private VPN, completely replacing the expensive CloudWatch solution. This provided enhanced visibility into application performance using Elastic APM, enabling teams to correlate logs with errors and identify high-latency requests proactively. We also established Prometheus and Grafana for comprehensive monitoring and alerting, creating a complete observability stack.
Seamless Migration Execution: We developed and executed a comprehensive migration strategy for moving workloads from ECS to EKS with minimal downtime. The cutover was meticulously planned and executed with zero errors, ensuring complete service continuity throughout the transition. Our phased approach minimized risk while maximizing the benefits of the new infrastructure.
Enhanced Security and Developer Experience: We implemented a secure VPN solution for private access to databases and VMs, improving both security and developer productivity. We prepared and thoroughly tested a detailed disaster recovery plan for both services and databases, ensuring business continuity in any failure scenario.
Results
The migration and modernization efforts delivered exceptional, measurable results that exceeded Firmway's expectations and provided significant business value.
Substantial Cost Reductions: The infrastructure transformation achieved significant cost savings through multiple optimization strategies. The migration to ARM-based instances and strategic use of spot instances dramatically reduced compute costs, while the transition from CloudWatch to Elasticsearch for centralized logging eliminated expensive logging fees. The combination of environment shutdowns during non-business hours and the move away from costly DocumentDB further contributed to substantial operational expense reductions.
Dramatically Improved Operational Efficiency: The implementation of comprehensive CI/CD pipelines completely automated the deployment processes, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes while eliminating human errors entirely. GitOps practices ensured consistent and version-controlled configuration management, enabling faster development cycles and improved collaboration across teams. Developers could now focus on building features rather than managing infrastructure.
Enhanced System Visibility and Performance: The new observability stack with Elasticsearch APM and centralized logging transformed their ability to diagnose issues and track application performance. Teams gained unprecedented insights into system behavior, with the ability to correlate logs with errors and proactively identify performance bottlenecks. Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana introduced comprehensive alerting capabilities, enabling swift issue resolution before they impacted users.
Robust Security and Reliability: The high-availability MongoDB deployment ensured minimal downtime and improved data consistency. The comprehensive disaster recovery planning and testing mitigated business continuity risks, providing confidence in system reliability. The secure VPN implementation enhanced both security posture and developer productivity by providing safe, streamlined access to critical resources.
Flawless Migration Execution: Perhaps most remarkably, the migration from ECS to EKS was executed with zero downtime or errors, demonstrating the thoroughness of our planning and execution. This seamless transition maintained business operations while delivering immediate benefits from the new infrastructure capabilities.
Long-term Strategic Partnership: The success of the project led to an ongoing retainer contract with Firmway, focusing on continuous improvement and cost optimization. This partnership approach ensures that their infrastructure continues to evolve with their business needs while maintaining optimal performance and cost efficiency.
The comprehensive modernization successfully transformed Firmway's infrastructure from a manual, costly, and risky environment into a robust, automated, cost-efficient, and highly scalable platform that positioned them for sustained growth and innovation.
Client Testimonial
“We engaged with Cloud Solitaire to transform our DevOps infrastructure and practice, and I must say the results really exceeded our expectations. Led by Sagar, whose exceptional foundation in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Security, DevOps Architecture, Kubernetes, and CI/CD automation stands out, their team delivered a cost-efficient, scalable, and automated Cloud-native platform within an impressive 3 months. Their solutions included disaster recovery planning, cloud databases, and applications migration, all designed to optimise performance and achieve significant cost savings.
Sagar’s leadership and technical expertise were evident throughout the project, ensuring the solutions were robust, future-proof, and aligned with our business objectives. Following this success, we partnered with Cloud Solitaire for ongoing maintenance and feature development, hiring dedicated DevOps resources from their team. These resources, trained and supported under Sagar’s guidance, have been consistently delivering exceptional results.
Cloud Solitaire is more than just a service provider—they are a trusted partner driven by a deep understanding of their clients’ needs. With Sagar’s strong leadership and technical acumen at the helm, I highly recommend Cloud Solitaire to any organisation seeking expert DevOps solutions, including infrastructure modernisation, cloud migrations, and cost-effective automation strategies that deliver impactful, lasting value.”
Bhaidas Masule CTO, Co-Founder Firmway Services Private Limited