Waydev Migrates to AWS EKS

Introduction

Waydev, a YC alumni company, offers data-driven solutions for tracking engineers’ output. They faced several challenges, including a lack of infrastructure stability, scalability issues, slow software release cycles, opportunities for enhancing developer productivity, and long MTTR (mean time to recovery). Additionally, Waydev was in the process of acquiring SOC 3 certification.

Their objectives were establishing an infrastructure platform to help scale the business, implementing a fully containerized environment to reduce complexity, deploying auto-scalable infrastructure on top of Kubernetes, and utilizing managed services.

The environment that needed modernization and migration consisted of a PHP monolithic app running on virtual servers, a self-managed MySQL database with room for improvement in backup strategy, and areas to streamline infrastructure provisioning and operations.

Solution Overview

CloudHero crafted a migration plan that included containerizing workloads, migrating to AWS EKS, and shifting from MySQL to Amazon Aurora. Using Terraform to deploy everything as code, Waydev achieved stable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure, improved software release cycles, and better developer productivity. AWS was the right choice for infrastructure because it facilitated SOC 3 accreditation, adding another layer of trust and compliance to their infrastructure.

Migration Process

The migration took only two hours, thanks to CloudHero’s automated migration process. CloudHero used tools like Migy (Migration Assessment Tool), Squid (App Containerization Assessment Tool), and Captain (Automatic Landing Zone Deployment Tool) during the migration. Captain, CloudHero’s landing zone automated deployment system is optimized for creating SOC 3-certified infrastructures, ensuring a smooth certification process for Waydev.

“We scheduled the migration for one Sunday at midnight. Just one day before, we encountered an infrastructure issue that generated downtime. The CloudHero team was there for us. We realized the problem stemmed from our existing cloud provider at that time and decided to migrate. Together with CloudHero, we performed the entire migration to AWS in less than two hours.”

AWS Services Used

Waydev leveraged a range of AWS services to optimize its infrastructure and enhance stability. These services included:

• Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)
• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS CloudTrail

Results after Migrating to EKS on AWS

The migration yielded several positive results: a 95% reduction in downtime-generating events, average MTTR down to <4m from +2h, 85% improvement in developer productivity, and a 45% reduction in infrastructure costs within two months.

Migration Steps following the AWS Well-Architected Framework

1. Assess the pre-migration environment
2. Application containerization following the AWS Well-Architected Container Lens practice 
3. Set up the SOC3-compliant Landing Zone using
4. Deploy Waydev’s application stack on EKS
5. Migrate from MySQL to Amazon Aurora
6. Deploy everything as code using Terraform following the GitOps Practice
7. Optimize for performance, security, and cost management

Conclusion

Migrating to AWS with EKS and RDS in just two hours, Waydev enjoyed the benefits of stable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure. This migration improved software release cycles and developer productivity. With CloudHero’s help, Waydev continues revolutionizing how engineering leaders track engineers’ output and make data-driven, objective decisions.