Migration of Python Application to AWS for World Traders

Who are the Worshipful Company of World Traders?

The Worshipful Company of World Traders is one of the 110 prestigious livery companies based in the City of London. This organization brings together traders across financial services and trading sectors, hosting events for its members and providing funding to educate and train young people for careers in international trade.

Customer Challenge

The Worshipful Company of World Traders faced challenges with their existing membership portal, which was hosted on a non-DevOps optimized environment. The company needed to migrate their portal to a more reliable, resilient, and scalable environment on AWS while adopting a workflow that allowed for frequent, small incremental changes.

In addition to these challenges, the there was significant technical debt, which hindered the deployment of new features and improvements. World Traders sought to clean up the existing technical debt and transform their approach to deploying updates. By migrating to a DevOps-centric environment, the company aimed to improve the agility of their development processes and align their technology strategy with their business objectives.

Why Lambert Labs?

Lambert Labs were chosen to take over the hosting and maintenance of the World Traders membership portal because of our expertise with Python and our proficiency with AWS.

Partner Solution

Lambert Labs was selected to address these challenges due to their expertise in Python and proficiency with AWS. The team at Lambert Labs began the transformation process by migrating the Python/Django-based membership portal to AWS. We utilized AWS CloudFormation to template the infrastructure, ensuring easy redeployment and facilitating the creation of staging and production environments. These environments allowed for robust release and deployment processes, enabling the World Traders to adopt a workflow that supported frequent, small incremental changes.

To enhance the reliability, resilience, and scalability of the portal, Lambert Labs set up a production deployment using a load-balanced Elastic Beanstalk environment, connected to a MySQL database running on AWS RDS. They configured a VPC with the load balancer residing in a public subnet, while the application and database layers were placed in a private subnet for enhanced security. This architecture not only improved the portal’s performance but also ensured a secure and scalable environment for future growth.

Lastly, Lambert Labs conducted an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review to ensure that the new infrastructure adhered to AWS best practices. This review helped identify areas for improvement and optimization, further enhancing the overall performance, security, and reliability of the membership portal. By implementing DevOps best practices and leveraging AWS services, Lambert Labs successfully transformed the World Traders’ membership portal, enabling the organization to better serve its members and meet its business objectives.

We now host and maintain the World Traders membership portal on an ongoing basis, providing infrastructure management and feature development services where required.

Results and Benefits

By migrating the World Traders’ membership portal to AWS and implementing DevOps best practices, Lambert Labs delivered several key benefits. The enhanced reliability and performance of the portal meant reduced downtime and faster response times, improving the user experience for members. The infrastructure, defined by CloudFormation templates, enabled easy redeployment and facilitated the adoption of CI/CD pipelines in CircleCI. This allowed for small, incremental changes, streamlining the development process and reducing the risk of deployment errors.

Furthermore, the improved process ensured that site recovery objectives were met or exceeded, bolstering confidence in the portal’s resilience. The transformation of the World Traders’ business approach, from large releases to frequent, small updates, has allowed them to be more agile and responsive to member needs. Overall, Lambert Labs’ expertise in AWS and DevOps best practices has significantly improved the performance, scalability, and security of the World Traders’ membership portal, empowering the organization to better serve its members and achieve its goals.

Measurably, the benefits that Lambert Labs delivered include:

  • 100% uptime since the migration.
  • A 67% decrease in the mean response latency to 0.2s.
  • Reduced deployment time to 13 minutes in a completely automated fashion.
  • Improvement of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objectives to 24 hours and 4 hours respectively.
  • Improved logging and monitoring reduced development team time spent debugging application bugs by 60%

About Lambert Labs

Lambert Labs, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, is a Python and cloud development company based in London. We specialize in providing Python development services, AWS consulting services, and AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.

We participate in various APN programs, including:

  • AWS Well-Architected Partner Program
  • AWS Reseller
  • AWS CloudFormation Service Validation holder
  • AWS RDS Service Validation holder
  • AWS Public Sector Program
  • AWS Immersion Day Program

Our expertise in AWS technologies and commitment to delivering high-quality solutions have made us a trusted partner for clients seeking reliable and efficient solutions to meet their business objectives.

If you would like to find out a little bit more about Lambert Labs then please feel free to read out about our Python development services, AWS consulting services or AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.