AWS Cloud keeps Oslo Area Commuters moving

Ruter serves all user groups. The differences are considerable. One example is that while new generations are fully digital, the elderly still want paper tickets. Oslo was the European Environmental Capital in 2019. Environmentally friendly transport is therefore given considerable political weight. At the same time that the fleet is being renewed with state-of-the-art electric and biogas means of transport, both at sea and on land, it also includes older means of transport running on fossil fuels that need to be managed. In parallel with this, Ruter must manage the pressures from a population growth of approximately 25 percent over the next 15 years. The pressure is further increased by public transport becoming the alternative option when Oslo city centre is made almost car-free.

The range of technology in the IT solutions is large and complex. The pressure for innovation is huge while at the same time everything has to work perfectly. There is little patience for delays.

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.

The advantages

With approximately 400 million journeys by public transport every year and little acceptance for delays, Ruter needs a complex, machine-based infrastructure with stable operation. Ruter chose Basefarm due to their ability to handle complexity, and their expertise in service delivery from AWS and mobile, programmatic infrastructure/IaC. When the decision was made, the AWS cloud solution emerged as the most relevant, most mature and the one with the best roadmap. For future solutions, Ruter’s innovation team, together with the advisors at Basefarm, have arranged for the utilisation of PaaS services, containers and DevOps-based culture.

About Ruter

Ruter AS is a public joint administration company for public transport in Norway’s capital city Oslo and the neighbouring county of Akershus. This is one of Europe’s fastest growing metropolitan areas. With around 400 million journeys per year, Ruter is responsible for over half of Norway’s public transport.

In its future planning, the company is looking at combined mobility. This means helping people not only from the stop to stop, but from door to door by bus, tram, boat, rail, bike and on foot. Ruter is meeting digital side of this challenge with their “Kafka” platform. Kafka is a common, scalable solution that allows information to flow between different transport systems and IT systems. This agile platform allows new systems to be integrated relatively easily meaning that both new transport options and user needs can be safeguarded.

About Basefarm

Basefarm is a European managed service provider creating market leaders, by integrating key skills of big data, cloud services and information security into a service offering.
The company provides strategic advice, architecture and implementation together with the management and operation of solutions to several different cloud platforms.

The business was founded in 2000 in the Nordic countries and today there are 550 leading engineers and advisors working in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Basefarm was ranked highest in Whitelane’s IT Outsourcing study Nordics 2018 and was approved by Gartner as cool vendor supplier at the European Cloud Computing Market 2015 for our unique methodology in application operations.

In August 2018, Basefarm was acquired by Orange Group and is now an Orange Business Service subsidiary.