Migrating to AWS Cloud can increase application performance and lower infrastructure cost, shifting IT budget toward application improvement and innovation.

Stein Fibers is a domestic manufacturer, importer, and distributor of synthetic fibers. As one of the largest suppliers and producers in North America, the company’s products are used in the production of many consumer products we use daily. These products and applications cross a variety of industries, including automotive, furniture, bedding, clothing, home decor, medical, filtration, and construction.

Challenge

Stein Fibers needed a team to provide support for their in-house developed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This mission critical system handles sales orders, order scheduling, import tracking, shipment tracking, cost of sales, forecasting, inventory management and more. With multiple instances of the software running to accommodate separate business units, the deployment pipeline was both complex and expensive to operate.

Stein Fibers partnered with Gavant with a few objectives in mind. The near term goal was to provide day-to-day support for the application, handling both system maintenance and software improvements. Over the long term, we would improve the infrastructure and software to enable modern standards of form, function, architecture, security and DevOps.

Solution

Gavant’s primary priority was to establish a robust infrastructure that would eliminate system outages and minimize downtime. Leveraging our expertise in DevOps and AWS, we performed a migration from Stein Fibers’ 3rd-party hosting platform to AWS Cloud. The application servers are running on size-appropriate EC2 nodes to balance application performance with cost. The databases are running on RDS with read replicas to segregate mission critical operation from lower priority loads, like reporting and data mining. We’re using S3 and CloudFront to host an enterprise mobile app and WAF for general security and adherence to Apple’s requirements for enterprise app distribution.

With a new infrastructure in place, the final step was application and infrastructure monitoring. We configured CloudWatch to monitor server metrics and general application availability. Relevant parties are notified via SNS, which enables realtime visibility of system health and the fastest possible response time.

We completed the migration ahead of schedule in under two months. This includes evaluation of the original architecture and forward planning for a new approach.

Results

Stein Fibers now has a reliable and robust infrastructure that brings them comfort and confidence.

  • Application performance increased 60%
  • Infrastructure cost decreased 50%
  • System outages reduced to 0

As a result of migrating to AWS Cloud, Stein Fibers’ IT budget shifted from infrastructure maintenance to application innovation.