Case Studies | GovTech

A Kubernetes foundation on AWS to prove the client can scale

Kubernetes Platform Build

About

A GovTech business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The build had three focus areas, each aimed at proving AWS as a scalable home for the platform.

Proving AWS could host and scale the platform

This was a confidence-building exercise: the point was to demonstrate that AWS could run the client's services reliably and scale them, so the team could decide on AWS as the foundation for future development with real evidence rather than assumption.

Standing up the right services in two regions

The Journey Service, Trip Planner and the platform each needed to run on Amazon EKS, and they had to be deployed across both the UK and US regions, covering production and development, so the environment matched how the client actually operates.

Building to best practice with a path to Terraform

The clusters needed the right network isolation, identity and autoscaling to be production-grade, and they had to be deployed as infrastructure as code, starting with CloudFormation for the proof of concept so the client could then convert it to Terraform and own it.

Solution

Cloud Combinator built the foundation in the order the platform depends on it: the network first, then the clusters and their compute, then the services, load balancing and storage, and finally testing and handover.

2 regions

Clusters in eu-west-2 (UK) and us-east-1 (US), production and development

3 services

Journey Service, Trip Planner and the platform on Amazon EKS

$65.7k

Indicative annual AWS run rate across both regions (projected)

By the numbers:

  • 2 regions - Clusters in eu-west-2 (UK) and us-east-1 (US), production and development
  • 3 services - Journey Service, Trip Planner and the platform on Amazon EKS
  • $65.7k - Indicative annual AWS run rate across both regions (projected)
Changes

Acceptance was met when the Kubernetes clusters were deployed on Amazon EKS with the Journey Service, Trip Planner and the platform running and integrated, and AWS was demonstrated as a suitable, scalable environment for the client's continued development. The build gave the client a working, autoscaling foundation it could test against and take forward.

  • A scalable Kubernetes foundation — The services run on Amazon EKS with EC2 worker nodes in autoscaling groups, so capacity follows demand.
  • Two regions, cleanly separated — Production and development environments run in both the UK and US, matching how the client operates.
  • Traffic handled and secured — A load balancer distributes traffic and absorbs spikes, with HTTPS provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager.
  • Storage in place — Amazon S3 holds application data and backups, and Amazon EBS provides persistent storage for the Open Trip Planner.
  • Handover — Deployed as CloudFormation for the proof of concept and handed over for the client to convert to Terraform and own the environment.

With AWS proven as a scalable home for its services, the client is positioned to take the foundation forward in Terraform, to bring more of its platform onto AWS, and to scale the navigation services across regions as the product grows.

AWS Stack

Amazon EKS

For running the client's navigation services as managed Kubernetes clusters.

Amazon EC2

With autoscaling groups for the worker nodes, so the services scale with demand.

Elastic Load Balancing

For distributing traffic across the clusters and absorbing spikes.

Amazon S3

And Amazon EBS for application data and backups and for the Open Trip Planner's persistent storage.

Amazon VPC

And AWS Certificate Manager for network isolation and HTTPS.

AWS CloudFormation

For the proof-of-concept infrastructure as code, handed over for conversion to Terraform.

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