Migrating and modernizing a membership web portal with World Traders using AWS

Overview

The Worshipful Company of World Traders, a historic Livery Company of the City of London, needed to migrate their membership portal in order to improve its reliability and scalability. Faced with limitations from their existing hosting provider, they partnered with Lambert Labs to migrate and modernize their infrastructure on AWS. This project involved a strategic migration of their existing workload to a scalable and reliable AWS environment. By leveraging AWS services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon RDS for MySQL, Lambert Labs delivered a robust solution that improved performance, enhanced security, and enabled World Traders to streamline their operations and better support their mission of promoting world trade.

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

The Worshipful Company of World Traders, a Livery Company of the City of London, faced significant challenges with their existing membership portal. Hosted on infrastructure that proved insufficient, the portal lacked the scalability and reliability necessary to effectively serve their members. World Traders recognized the need to migrate their portal to a more robust platform that could support their evolving needs and ensure a positive user experience.

Their current cloud hosting provider could not offer the required scalability and reliability. This led to potential performance issues and hindered the portal’s ability to handle growth.

The existing environment also lacked modern deployment practices, making it difficult to implement frequent updates and slowing down the deployment of new features and improvements. Furthermore, significant technical debt within the system hindered those deployments, creating a bottleneck for innovation and modernization.

In essence, World Traders’ opportunity was to migrate their membership portal to a more reliable, resilient, and scalable environment on AWS. This migration aimed to address the limitations of their previous hosting provider, modernize their development practices, and transform their approach to deploying updates, ultimately aligning their technology strategy with their business objectives.

Solution

To address the challenges faced by World Traders, Lambert Labs implemented a robust solution centered on migrating their membership portal to a modern AWS architecture. This involved a transformation from their previous hosting environment to a more scalable and reliable platform.

The migration leveraged key AWS services to build a strong foundation for the portal. Elastic Beanstalk was used to deploy and manage the Python/Django application, simplifying deployment and ensuring scalability. The application was containerized using Docker for consistency across environments. RDS provided a reliable and managed database solution. AWS CloudFormation was utilized to template the infrastructure, enabling efficient deployment and management of both staging and production environments.

To improve the portal’s reliability, resilience, and scalability, the new infrastructure was designed with security and performance in mind. This included network security measures using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, with application instances and the database in private subnets, while Elastic Load Balancing was used to distribute traffic. This AWS-based solution enabled World Traders to establish a more dependable, secure, and scalable environment for their membership portal.

Outcome

The migration to AWS delivered significant improvements for World Traders, enabling them to enhance their operations and better serve their members.

The new AWS infrastructure has provided a more reliable and scalable platform for their membership portal. This has ensured consistent access and performance, leading to a better experience for members.

Furthermore, the modernized environment supports more efficient deployment processes. This allows World Traders to introduce updates and new features more quickly and safely, enabling them to adapt to evolving needs and provide greater value to their community. Overall, the AWS migration has empowered World Traders to modernize their online presence, improve their services, and lay a strong foundation for future growth.

While smaller hosting providers can sometimes offer an interesting entry point to the cloud, they often run into scalability issues. After migrating to AWS and modernizing their infrastructure, World Traders are well positioned moving forwards. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About World Traders

The Worshipful Company of World Traders is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. It is a modern Livery Company, having been granted Livery by the Court of Aldermen with effect from 2000. The Company promotes the importance of world trade, facilitates networking and education, and supports charitable activities.