Woflow

How nClouds helped Woflow migrate its Merchant Data Platform from Heroku to AWS and modernize its application to optimize scalability, operational efficiency, and costs using nOps.

About Woflow

Woflow began its business of catalog digitization and data management in 2017. Their mission is to structure the world's unstructured data. To accomplish that mission, Woflow created the world's first Merchant Data Platform. The Woflow Engine is an ML-powered task automation system that empowers merchants to create, catalog, and manage complex structured data at scale. Woflow works with many industry innovators in food delivery, retail, e-commerce, etc. The Woflow Engine optimizes hundreds of thousands of merchant and customer interactions per month. To learn more, go to woflow.com

Industry

Data Management, E-commerce, POS

Location

San Francisco, CA

Challenge

Migrate from Heroku to AWS and modernize its application to optimize scalability, operational efficiency, and costs.

Featured Service

Application Modernization, Managed DevOps Services, Migration Services, 24/7 Support Services, AWS Consolidated Billing, ShareSave Service by nOps

The Results

23% savings on AWS compute & 40% savings on overall AWS bill

Enhanced operational efficiency and faster time-to-market

Improved scalability and reliability

Challenge

Migrate from Heroku to AWS and modernize its application to optimize scalability, operational efficiency, and costs.
Woflow’s application frontend was already deployed in AWS, and they needed to migrate the backend portion of the application from Heroku to AWS to achieve improved scalability and operational efficiency. The company wanted to automate environment buildout using AWS CloudFormation, modernize their application by containerizing it with Amazon ECS, and implement an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and a proper network structure.

Solution

nClouds, a partner of nOps, migrated Woflow’s application suite from Heroku to AWS to increase scalability and operational efficiency. Woflow’s application stack included three single-page frontend applications, one backend monolith application, and one worker app deployed in Heroku. Redis was used as a cache, and data was stored in Postgres. nClouds deployed Woflow’s application stack on AWS in several stages, including containerizing the backend monolith and worker application, developing AWS CloudFormation code to provision the basic network infrastructure, deploying the three single-page frontend apps in Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, and deploying both backend services to the new Amazon ECS platform. The results are presented in the following schematic.

The Benefits

Teaming with nClouds, Woflow now has a modernized application aligned with AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices. The project has yielded numerous benefits:

23% savings on AWS compute & 40% savings on overall AWS bill

Using nClouds' ShareSave Service, Woflow has achieved 23% net savings on its AWS compute costs with 100% flexibility and zero lock-in. ShareSave is an expert, AI-driven service that provides autopilot management of AWS commitments. Plus, as part of the Monthly Cost Optimization Reviews that nClouds provides with AWS consolidated billing, the nClouds team found and implemented two changes that resulted in 40% overall savings on their overall AWS bill. The nOps cloud management platform provides continuous insights on Woflow’s AWS infrastructure health for cost optimization, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence so that the company is alerted and can make any necessary remediations.

Enhanced operational efficiency and faster time-to-market

Operational efficiency is critical when measuring organizational performance. It’s about delivering products or services to customers efficiently while ensuring the high quality of products, services, and support. By migrating Woflow’s application suite to AWS, nClouds streamlined base operations and eliminated needless redundancies and waste. Operational efficiency accelerates the development cycle to reach markets faster and improves operational stability to increase availability. With a modernized application, Woflow can innovate faster, reduce risk, and accelerate time-to-market.

Improved scalability and reliability

Scalability is the ability to adapt to growth and increased demand. Reliability is the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. Migrating to Amazon ECS provides Woflow with reduced operational overhead and improved scalability, reliability, and security. Scalability is also delivered by CloudFront, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Workload data and resources are distributed across three AZs to increase availability, reliability, and fault tolerance.

“There is a day and night difference between nClouds’ AWS and DevOps expertise and that of our previous service provider. We were so impressed with nClouds’ work to help us migrate Woflow from Heroku to Amazon ECS that we asked them to provide ongoing Managed DevOps Services to improve and maintain our application suite.”

Andrew Harasta, Senior Software Engineer, Woflow