“Nationwide on the move – at home locally.” That is the motto of DB Regio Bus, the bus division of DB Regio AG. With over 40 companies and subsidiaries, it is responsible for keeping bus transport running in large parts of Germany.
The challenge
As a central service provider for mobility, Deutsche Bahn offers a platform that brings bus travelers and bus companies together through the acquisition of Snapbus. By specifying a fixed route, a date, and a group size, bus trips can be planned and booked online in just a few steps.
The platform was developed and operated by Snapbus GmbH. The challenge was therefore to migrate an existing application into the complex IT infrastructure of DB Regio Bus.
- Requirement: Minimal disruption to operations and seamless migration of all data
- Coordination of internal and external stakeholders for the further development and optimization of the application
On the IT infrastructure side, it had to be ensured that the existing infrastructure complied with the compliance and security guidelines of the Deutsche Bahn Group. In addition, a separation between staging and production operations had to be ensured. The infrastructure was provided on a versioned code basis, taking AWS Well-Architected into account.
The solution
Standardization and reusability
The successful integration of acquisitions into a corporation is an important prerequisite for its growth. Cloud services offer the opportunity to leverage the innovative power of startups for corporations as well. This is not without its challenges. In addition to complying with the corporation's compliance guidelines, stricter security standards often have to be met.
In this project, peripheral systems such as automated rollouts, monitoring, and logging were designed for reusability and standardization. They form the stable framework for the successful migration of future projects and products.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, AWS S3 & Cloudfront, and AWS RDS were used for the application-specific components.
Security and future viability
In the rapidly evolving cloud industry, it is essential to regularly update applications and infrastructures. Failure to do so results in technical debt, which leads to high additional costs for updates and changes in the long term. As part of the migration, we adapted the application and infrastructure in accordance with the latest AWS requirements and corporate guidelines. The measures implemented by PROTOS guarantee not only increased security but also the future viability of the application.
During the project, PROTOS Technologie GmbH provided consulting and implementation support for the migration of the application and the restructuring of the infrastructure. To ensure a high speed of innovation, the project was carried out using agile methodology. This involved collaboration with an external development team.
Implementation
The first step of the migration involved rebuilding the infrastructure. The second step was to optimize the application and infrastructure. In addition, a separate test system was set up to test any changes to the infrastructure and application.
As part of the rebuild, the infrastructure was built using Terraform as infrastructure-as-code. Combined with the software versioning technology GIT, this ensured reproducibility, testability, and automatic rollbacks. Changes to the infrastructure code were rolled out automatically using a CI/CD pipeline (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment). The AWS Developer Tools AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild were used for this purpose. Reproducibility was used to provide an exact replica of the infrastructure as a production system within a few minutes.
The application itself uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a Platform-as-a-Service offering. Elastic Beanstalk handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, and automatic scaling, right through to application status monitoring.
In addition, an SQL database and in-memory storage are connected (using AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) and AWS Redis).
To enable CI/CD, front-end and back-end changes were automated in line with the infrastructure and for both environments using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS Pipeline. Unit and integration testing of the application artifact within the CI/CD pipeline is also automated.
In the second step of the migration, the application and the underlying infrastructure were optimized. Superfluous components of the infrastructure were removed and security-critical parts were redesigned.
The advantages
Standardization of an external application
Peripheral systems such as automated rollouts, monitoring, and logging are designed for reusability and standardization, thus providing a stable framework for the successful migration of future projects and products.
Use of agile methods to ensure high project speed
To ensure maximum project speed, the project was implemented using agile methodology (Scrum) in collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. This enabled close cooperation between the software team, infrastructure development, and project management.
Scalable, highly available solution
By using S3 for web hosting, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Relational Database Service, a scalable and highly available solution was provided.
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