Moosend: Mobilising to Accelerate Cloud Migration

About Moosend

Moosend is an email marketing and automation platform. It offers a range of tools and features designed to help businesses create, send, and track email campaigns effectively. It aims to simplify email marketing processes, improve engagement with subscribers, and help companies to achieve their marketing goals through effective email campaigns and automation.

Sitecore acquired Moosend in May 2021 to form Sitecore Marketing Automation, a key component in Sitecore’s journey to accelerate the building of the industry’s first fully integrated, end-to-end SaaS-based digital experience platform (DXP).

The Challenge

Moosend operated its main infrastructure from a colocation facility in the Netherlands (Leaseweb) and maintained several services in a secondary location, Frankfurt (Hetzner).

Maintenance and upgrades were proving complex and time-consuming, and not being able to utilise the managed services offered by a cloud-native approach was hurting Moosend’s modernisation journey.

Scaling the infrastructure was also a challenge, and Moosend could not react efficiently to sudden growth in demand. With an impending business need to deploy to a second region and more growth to follow, it was clear that the existing infrastructure was not the correct solution.

Having explored options to transform their underlying platform, Moosend elected to modernise and migrate to AWS.

The Solution

Ubertas comprehensively analysed Moosend’s existing environment’s architecture, costs, challenges, and drivers for change. Through this, the team performed dependency mapping and performance analyses on the current infrastructure and services. It then developed a well-defined mobilisation and migration plan that aligned with Moosend’s specific goals and requirements.

The proposed solution split the monolith into different microservices based on business capabilities or functionalities and utilised several migration strategies, including re-platforming and re-factoring. Key solution components are:

Network architecture

Ubertas designed a hub-and-spoke network architecture using Transit Gateway in the central networking account in AWS to align with Moosend’s on-prem environment and ensure connectivity between the two. The solution fully utilised AWS CloudFormation and CloudFormation macros to deploy all networking resources and transit gateway attachments in multiple regions without any manual configurations.

Serverless architecture

Ubertas helped design and implement applications and systems that leverage AWS serverless services without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. Key services used are Lambda and Fargate for compute, Amazon API Gateway for RESTful APIs, DynamoDB for NoSQL database, S3 for object storage, EventBridge for event-driven workflows, SQS and SNS for messaging services and asynchronous communication.

Post-migration optimisation

Ubertas helped Moosend with post-migration optimisation of performance, cost-efficiency, security, and operational excellence—this involved refining architecture where required and implementing cost-saving measures.

Monitoring & observability

To gain insights into the performance, health, and behaviour of applications and infrastructure deployed on AWS, Ubertas used services like CloudWatch, integration with Zabbix and NewRelic, for APM used Amazon OpenSearch and self-managed ElasticSearch cluster on EC2s.

Infrastructure-as-code

Terraform and CloudFormation were used to deploy all resources so Moosend could adopt DevOps practices, implement CI/CD pipelines, and leverage AWS automation tools for infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and deployment processes. Bitbucket and Terraform Cloud were used to deploy resources through pipeline runs and leveraging workspaces to deploy all resources in multiple regions keeping the runs DRY.

The project delivered the end-to-end build of an AWS best-practice platform underpinned by the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which accelerated Moosend’s migration journey, reduced risks, and maximised the benefits of migrating to the AWS cloud, supplemented with AWS funding and discount initiatives.

The Benefits

Overall, Moosend has experienced significant improvements in their operations and infrastructure through their use of AWS services and practices.

• Their network management has been greatly simplified through the implementation of the Hub and Spoke model or central VPC model. This has allowed for easier configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting, as well as consistent security policies across the network.
• The use of AWS managed services, high availability, cross-region replication, and backup and restore has significantly reduced their recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) from days to hours. This has been further supported by AWS serverless architecture, which has increased development velocity, reduced operational overhead, and provided cost optimisation, ease of scalability and elasticity allowing scaling to occur in hours not days.
• Moosend has gained a holistic view of its applications and infrastructure using AWS observability services such as CloudWatch, OpenSearch, and Zabbix integration. This has allowed for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting of deployment issues, optimisation of performance, and ensuring the reliability and security of its infrastructure. These benefits will improve operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and enhance user experiences.
• The adoption of DevOps practices, specifically Infrastructure as Code (IaC), has provided Moosend with automation and consistency that ensures infrastructure setups are consistent across different AWS environments and regions. This has resulted in better infrastructure lifecycle management and reduced RTO and RPO times.