Modernizing Wag & Company’s infrastructure on AWS in order to enhance scalability and reliability

Overview

Wag & Company is a prominent charity in the North East of England dedicated to providing companionship to isolated and lonely individuals through dog visits. Recognizing the importance of a reliable and scalable technology infrastructure to support their operations, Wag & Company partnered with Lambert Labs to modernize their systems using AWS. This collaboration involved migrating their systems to a more robust AWS environment, enhancing scalability and reliability, and implementing modern development practices. By leveraging AWS services, Wag & Company has improved the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their operations, enabling them to better serve their community.

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

Wag & Company, a prominent charity in the North East of England, plays a vital role in providing companionship to isolated and lonely individuals through dog visits. To effectively manage their operations, which involve coordinating numerous volunteers and ensuring the well-being of both volunteers and service users, Wag & Company relies heavily on its web portal.   

However, Wag & Company faced significant challenges with their existing technology infrastructure. Longstanding issues in their codebase had led to application instability, hindering their ability to efficiently manage and scale their services. They recognized the need to stabilize their application and enhance the overall architecture of their system. The charity required a more reliable and cost-effective system, capable of mitigating future disruptions and supporting their growth, all while optimizing their operational costs. Ultimately, Wag & Company needed to ensure they could effectively deliver their vital services to a growing number of people in need.

Solution

To address Wag & Company’s challenges and enhance their operational efficiency, Lambert Labs collaborated closely with the charity to implement a solution centered on modernizing their technology infrastructure using AWS. A key aspect of this modernization involved migrating Wag & Company’s systems to more scalable and flexible AWS services. This transition moved them away from their previous hosting, which was limiting their ability to grow and adapt, to a more robust and cloud-native environment.

The modernized architecture leverages several key AWS services to improve performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. This AWS-centric approach allows Wag & Company to optimize costs by only paying for the compute resource that they need at any time, which is extremely important for charities. Amazon EC2 was implemented to provide a scalable and managed environment for running their applications. Amazon Relational Database Service was utilized to provide a reliable, high-performance, and managed database solution. These services, along with Amazon S3 for data storage, Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, AWS WAF for enhanced security, and Amazon Simple Email Service for reliable email sending, form the foundation of Wag & Company’s new infrastructure on AWS.    

In addition to modernizing the infrastructure, Lambert Labs also focused on improving the software development lifecycle. To streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying updates, a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline was implemented. This automation ensures the system’s integrity, accelerates the release of new features, and improves the reliability of deployments.

We identified Lambert Labs as the right firm to help take us forward into the future and further improve the system and enable us to scale. (Diane Morton, Chair, Wag & Company)

Outcome

The solutions implemented for Wag & Company delivered significant improvements in the reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of their technology infrastructure.

By migrating to AWS and utilizing services like EC2 and RDS, Wag & Company gained access to a scalable infrastructure that adapts to their operational demands. This scalability ensures that Wag & Company only pays for the computing resources they need at any given time, directly addressing their need for cost optimization. As a charity, this is extremely important because it means that cost is optimized.   

The modernized AWS infrastructure also provides a more secure foundation for Wag & Company’s operations. The web portal contains sensitive information, and the move to AWS allows them to store all of that data extremely securely, further enhancing the efficiency and safety of their vital services.   

Ultimately, the improvements delivered by the AWS-based solution enable Wag & Company to more effectively manage their operations, support their volunteers, and expand their services to help more people in need.

Modernizing Wag & Co’s infrastructure on AWS demonstrated how it’s possible to run production grade, scalable workloads in AWS on a small budget. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Wag & Company

Wag & Company is a charity operating in the North East of England. It stands as the largest visiting charity focused on providing companionship through dog visits. Wag & Company’s volunteers visit people in care and medical establishments, and also provide home visiting with dogs for people who are isolated and alone.