{"id":709730,"date":"2025-04-28T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.devoteam.com\/success-story\/homesearch-aws-well-architected-devops-and-migration\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T08:00:00","slug":"homesearch-aws-well-architected-devops-and-migration","status":"publish","type":"success-story","link":"https:\/\/devoteam.info\/en-dk\/success-story\/homesearch-aws-well-architected-devops-and-migration\/","title":{"rendered":"Homesearch: AWS Well-Architected, DevOps and Migration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About Homesearch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Homesearch<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a leading provider of property data and insights in the United Kingdom, with the most comprehensive information database of both residential and commercial property anywhere in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They collect, process, and analyse vast quantities of data, which drives a toolset that enables Estate Agents nationally to access a complete set of data for all properties in the UK, regardless of whether they are currently on the market or not, and leverage this information to generate leads, instructions and inform valuations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Challenge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The front-end applications were hosted on bare-metal and served using Nginx reverse proxy. The user pool had been rapidly increasing and the existing infrastructure could not support the growth in demand; the primary challenge was that they were unable to scale and manage their existing infrastructure. Significant data builds were required that would, in some cases, take up to two months to complete, representing a significant lag for data builds on which all applications depend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maintaining a competitive edge<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In addition to this, all back-end applications were using a single database as source, resulting in a high amount of replicated data and as a result compromised data consistency and accuracy; which feeds low efficiency and high cost.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homesearch were also suffering from the lack of controls and governance around user access and data accessibility, with most of the resources in UK servers managed manually; which meant staff had access to a production environment, and in addition were using it has a development platform, operating out of line with best practice and representing a business continuity risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their private Cloud infrastructure held 46 TB of data in block storage which regularly had storage issues that required a high level of manual archiving and processing to relieve capacity, and to maintain operations. Due to the size of their data, backups were sizeable and the process to recover or restore data in a disaster recovery situation would have been extremely complex and lengthy; a risk the new technology leadership team wanted to address as a priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Following an initial review of the Homesearch on-premises and private Cloud environments, Devoteam and Homeseach worked closely to articulate the business benefits of migrating their workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Devoteam were able to get Homesearch access to AWS\u2019s\u00a0Migration Accelerator Program (MAP)<\/a>, a proven migration methodology for Cloud adoption, supplemented with AWS funding and discount initiatives. The project delivery was a collaborative effort between the Devoteam and Homesearch teams.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to satisfy the rapidly growing number of users front-end applications were migrated to S3 buckets, and served with CloudFront for optimal performance. All associated back-end services were containerised, and migrated to ECS. As part of the project all databases, applications and scripts that need to be migrated to improve Database performance were moved to the AWS Cloud. Front-end application data was migrated to OpenSearch and optimised search performance by 98%. All the applications have been containerised and migrated to ECS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To speed up development and automate deployments the\u00a0Devoteam Basecamp\u00a0was deployed. Alongside Basecamp Jenkins controller, Jenkins Agents were configured and deployed to run on ECS Fargate. To deploy all necessary infrastructure, Terraform (IaC \u2013 Infrastructure as Code) was utilised. Everything from UK Block Storage was migrated using DataSync to S3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backups were automated with different AWS Backup plans \u2013 and it was recommended by Devoteam that game days be used to test out recovery of those resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

9\/10 CSAT Score<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

45% Cost Savings<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

25% Increase in Productivity<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

MA validated best-practice implementation based upon the principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework<\/a>. Other benefits delivered through the migration and modernisation project include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n