EcoOnline ensures high uptime and a modern development platform with Basefarm as Ops manager in DevOps

EcoOnline ensures high uptime and a modern development platform with Basefarm as Ops manager in DevOps

With over 375 employees and 6,500 customers in more than 80 industries, EcoOnline is the largest software company in Northern Europe when it comes to developing innovative software technology for increased chemical safety and cost-effective EHS (environment, health, safety) work. The IT systems provided by EcoOnline are critical to their customers’ efforts to create safe workplaces and businesses. EcoOnline’s R&D department has 75 employees that ensure continuous development of their IT systems.

The main applications are currently “Chemical Manager” and “EcoOnline EHS”. “Chemical Manager” provides immediate access to chemical information in the event of critical incidents and supports the management of chemicals and chemical handling. Simply put, with “EcoOnline EHS” customers have the necessary tools to maintain full control of their EHS work, including audit documentation, risk assessments, work permits and deviation management.

The Challenge

EcoOnline has made several company acquisitions over the last years and has set aggressive targets for the future. The targets involve expansion to new countries, which means attracting new customers, new employees and, not least, the development of new services. The company needed a future-proof technological platform that could support its business strategy.

The company decided to go for migration to the public cloud. The requirements specification included automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) and autoscaling with a “pay as you go” pricing model. EcoOnline also wanted to consolidate its application environment by bringing together various core services and establishing common logins.

They also needed to ensure compliance with EU data storage and data processing rules.

Successful collaboration with Basefarm and AWS

Through Basefarm Cloud, Basefarm has provided EcoOnline with robust and secure private cloud operations throughout much of the latter company’s 20-year history. The company clearly saw the benefits of taking the public cloud journey together with Basefarm, which is both an AWS MSP partner and a private cloud specialist.

The code for EcoOnline’s VM-based application was first split into smaller elements – containers – with logical cohesion using the refactoring framework of AWS. AWS Fargate was chosen for this transition to container technology. Whereas VM technology is all about single servers, containers involve the deployment of packages in a sufficient number of instances. The solution uses AWS Aurora Serverless databases. In accordance with EcoOnline’s requirements specification, usage and costs scale up and down automatically, without human interference.

Basefarm used HashiCorp Terraform for the configuration of all the AWS components. Basefarm builds Terraform code (IaC – Infrastructure as Code) for the commissioning of infrastructure. Many well-proven IaC modules from both the HashiCorp Terraform library and Basefarm’s proprietary library have simplified the transition from VMs to container environments.

IaC is also used to implement and manage CI/CD through AWS Pipelines. For the developers, this automation transforms their normal workday from one filled with traditional technology and manual tasks to one that virtually boils down to the simple click of a button. Automation also ensures a reliable end result – every single time. EcoOnline can thus focus on application development instead of deployment and operation.

The AWS CloudFront CDN (Content Distribution Network) relieves the container environment through static content distribution.

With public cloud, operations teams most often work closely with development teams. The system architects at EcoOnline had no desire to become operations employees with 24/7 tasks. That’s why Basefarm has become a permanent part of EcoOnline’s Development and Operations organization (DevOps) through the Basefarm Platform Operations service offering.

Basefarm is also taking over responsibility for security setup and patching. The AI-based AWS GuardDuty and third-party tools are used to analyze potential errors, as well as to expose vulnerabilities and possible attacks. The security work is now service-oriented rather than server-oriented. The Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry) identifies any vulnerabilities in the code being compiled to the Docker image with AWS Pipeline.

Benefits

In the AWS MSP partner Basefarm, EcoOnline has a business partner whose delivery model and operating model cover both public and private cloud services. EcoOnline thus has only one customer team to deal with. Through the Basefarm Frontline Operations service offering, the company also has access to 24/7 support, monitoring and incident management for both operating environments.

With the AWS refactoring methodology, EcoOnline is making the leap from VM-based applications to a container-based platform with AWS Fargate. The commissioning is being implemented using IaC, which also controls the automated AWS Pipeline environment for containerization and the deployment of new code. EcoOnline’s development teams (Dev) can continue to concentrate on their tasks and entrust operations (Ops) to their partner Basefarm. Basefarm employees are an essential part of EcoOnline’s DevOps team.

Through this process, EcoOnline has achieved an important consolidation of applications and infrastructure. The switch to a future-proof platform entails significant simplification and streamlining. AWS’s cloud platform also provides a vast array of new opportunities for application and business development, including machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence. As an AWS MSP partner, Basefarm will help EcoOnline to make the most of these possibilities.

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.