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Rolli migration from Heroku to AWS
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The Business Challenge: Rolli needed a specific DevOps solution and wanted to change its cloud architecture after successfully launching, and migrating from Heroku to AWS. Even though Heroku was a good choice when releasing the product, as the team started scaling it and more users were using it, this choice became expensive. Besides that, after it started getting more traction, infrastructure security became an issue. The fact that the company couldn’t own the servers wasn’t something that the company could move forward with. Therefore it was necessary to move to a cloud provider where the team could own the servers fully.

Setting up AWS Environment: The AWS infrastructure and accounts have three primary requirements:

- Complete DevOps Automation;

- Provide access only to a few specific people to manage it;

- Allow anyone with privileges to deploy an application's new version with a single click.

The Application Architecture: The application was a Ruby on Rails 5.2 monolith. The goal was to just move as it was to AWS and have multiple instances accessing the same database. It was a straightforward scenario. Data would be moved from Heroku’s Postgres to AWS RDS, which was done by a simple data copy in moments of low traffic. The team was using Docker for development only but wanted to start using it in production as well.

Automation: Rolli’s Github account hosts the code repository and the team was using Github Actions to automate the tasks.

Conclusion: The final result is a flexible and automated infrastructure that securely executes applications. In comparison to Heroku, the prices are 25-27% lower than first projected due to the on-demand nature of Lambda and the utilization of ECS's auto-scaling features. The move to AWS also enabled the Rolli team to optimize the application code, lowering expenses even more (up to 50% actually). However, we believe that the openness and trust shown to us by the Rolli team was the decisive element in the success of this project. Ultimately, this resulted in outstanding cooperation, for which we are grateful.