Why Amazon Web Services and Basefarm?

Basefarm’s experts on mission-critical IT operations have a reputation for working with large, complex solutions. The company’s expertise in this type of operation in AWS – which Ruter’s organisation had at a high level established a preference for – was key to being selected as a partner.

Also central was Basefarm’s expertise, which complemented that of Ruter’s development team when it came to solution design, cost optimisation and the ability to contribute to continuous digital innovation on the Kafka platform established in AWS. Basefarm could fill roles in the DevOps team and help in the transition from traditional operations.  Crucial to Ruter was also the ability to operationalise new services, expertise in IoT and the operation of programmatic infrastructure versus traditional solutions based on hardware, software and configuration systems.

In order to establish the agile, future-oriented Kafka platform, many operational solutions have been transferred from private cloud to AWS public cloud. A new element in Ruter’s operating complexity is therefore getting existing IT systems to interact with AWS. Basefarm is heavily involved in preparing the AWS-based solutions for regular operations where a high level of availability and scalability are key elements. Ruter’s Kafka concept, where the company’s Core Mobility Platform (CMP) is included as a middleware, is built and powered by Basefarm.

The new, programmatic infrastructure of AWS is built from the ground up as IaC (Infrastructure As Code), with Terraform as a tool. As a publicly-owned business, Ruter must regularly put their procurements out to tender. An outcome of this may be a move to a different cloud services provided. An attempt to take this scenario into account has been included in the design.

In the new infrastructure, Ruter has been able to make over 1,500 major changes within the last two years. This is in strong contrast to hardware-based infrastructures where you normally want to limit such demanding, major changes. The transition means that Ruter is switching its procurement from infrastructure deliveries to service deliveries from Basefarm.

The migrated solutions are built on Amazon EC2 instances where Basefarm itself operates the key components Kafka, Cassandra, MQ (Message Queue) and several database services on Amazon RDS.

Basefarm delivers Platform Operations on CMP with 24/7 monitoring and incident management, and performs ongoing changes to infrastructure in order to optimise cost/use, performance and stability.

Through the service Guided Operations, Basefarm has supported Ruter within areas such as design and architecture, dimensioning, analysis and cost control, monitoring and alerting, security and IAM. The Ruter innovation team has worked in parallel to the cloud migration with the support of Basefarm. This is where the PaaS capabilities and roadmap in AWS are important. Ruter has made their development processes container-oriented with Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes). This also includes the organisation of operating models where high tempo innovation and DevOps are key words.

AWS is emerging as a pragmatic supplier, for example, with its database technology Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). Ruter uses several different database technologies. AWS provides freedom of choice with several PaaS database services to meet this need.

With Amazon EMR, Ruter can run Spark, Impala and other big data technologies. Tracking and recording data from the public transport fleet would be enormously expensive in a traditional infrastructure.