OOTI leveraged DoiT to seamlessly migrate from EKS to ECS and optimize costs and performance
Meet OOTI
OOTI, a leading company in the project management software industry, provides innovative solutions that simplify project planning and execution for teams of all sizes. Its comprehensive platform offers a suite of tools designed to enhance productivity and collaboration, allowing teams to manage tasks, track time, and allocate resources efficiently. OOTIโs flagship product is its project management platform, which empowers teams to plan, execute, and monitor projects seamlessly, ensuring that all aspects of a project are managed effectively from start to finish.
The Challenge
OOTI faced challenges migrating from Amazon EKS to AWS ECS as part of its broader strategy to strengthen reliability and performance in its cloud infrastructure. The primary issues encountered included frequent 502 timeouts, fragmented log visibility, and complications in setting up TLS/SSL. These problems were not only technical hurdles but also risked SLO breaches and degraded responsiveness, a critical factor for a company that relies on the smooth operation of its project management software.
As a project management platform, OOTI’s success hinges on providing a reliable and consistent user experience. Any service disruption, whether due to timeouts or log management issues, could directly impact its customersโ ability to manage their projects effectively. Additionally, TLS/SSL complications could become a security concern, potentially leaving its systems vulnerable to attacks or data breaches. These challenges could have eventually affected OOTI’s internal operations and the trust and satisfaction of its customers.
The Solution
OOTI worked with DoiT to leverage Cloud Reliability Engineering (CRE) expertise on cloud infrastructure and AWS services. DoiT began with an in-depth consultation to understand the issues affecting its migration from Amazon EKS to Amazon ECS. The team identified the root causes of the 502 timeouts, log handling difficulties, and SSL setup complications disrupting OOTIโs operations. AWS Elastic Beanstalk had been evaluated but was not the right fit for OOTIโs needs.
With a clear understanding of the problems, James, a DoiT CRE, developed a comprehensive migration strategy tailored to OOTIโs unique requirements. Central to this strategy was the transition from EKS to ECS, a move designed to improve reliability and performance and deliver better unit economics.
To proceed, DoiT assisted OOTI in configuring Amazon ECS and setting up VPC endpoints to lower traffic costs and keep data on the AWS backbone. Additionally, new Security Groups were configured to enhance overall security. The team also addressed traffic management by designing an ECS cluster tailored to the applicationโs needs, with autoscaling in mind. This setup, combined with load balancers and health checks, efficiently distributed traffic across tasks, significantly reducing 502 errors.
Throughout the migration, James and the team at DoiT provided continuous support, debugging application errors as they arose and ensuring that the transition was as smooth as possible. The proactive approach helped quickly resolve any issues that could have escalated into more significant problems. Additionally, James played a key role in training OOTI’s team on Docker and ECS, empowering the team to independently manage and maintain its new infrastructure. This training included creating ECS task definitions and using Amazon EventBridge for automated task scheduling, streamlining day-to-day operations.
A particularly critical decision during the migration was to move Celery tasks, used for handling asynchronous processes in Django, to ECS. This shift allowed OOTI to manage resources more effectively, leverage AWS Fargate Spot, and scale to demandโimproving performance and unit economics.
James carefully tailored the solution to meet OOTIโs specific needs, ensuring that the migration solved the immediate issues and set the stage for long-term success. By focusing on the unique aspects of OOTIโs application setup and deployment requirements, DoiT was able to deliver a solution that was both effective and sustainable.
The Results
The migration from EKS to ECS, facilitated by DoiT’s expertise, was a resounding success for OOTI. The company achieved a stable and responsive application environment, which was critical for maintaining its high service delivery standards. The transition also led to material efficiency gains, mainly through short-lived tasks and AWS Fargate Spot, which optimized resource usage and improved unit economics.
The migration improved system performance, enhanced resource management, and increased scalability, with all logs now centralized in Amazon CloudWatch and alarms set up to quickly spot failing tasks/containers, boosting reliability.
OOTIโs service now benefits from high availability across multiple Availability Zones, self-healing, and autoscaling infrastructure due to the robustness of Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate. AWS CloudFormation allows it to redeploy its services in any Region in minutes.
Strategic placement of Fargate tasks in private subnets and the use of AWS PrivateLink endpoints ensure workloads remain private behind the public load balancer.
What's Next?
Following the successful migration, OOTI is well-positioned to continue optimizing its cloud infrastructure. Next, the company will refine its Amazon RDS setup to improve performance and predictability while exploring additional efficiency opportunities. OOTI plans to leverage the knowledge and skills gained through its partnership to further optimize its cloud infrastructure.
OOTI aims to maintain an ongoing relationship with DoiT, pairing product insights with expert guidance as it scales and evolves its platform to meet growing customer needs.