Cloud Legends, in partnership with the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), has set up a highly available and scalable cloud infrastructure for the website knmi.nl. The KNMI is an important advisory body for society when it comes to atmospheric or seismological information. The website knmi.nl is an important source for individuals, businesses, scientists, policymakers, and leaders. Although we do not know the exact future climate, the knowledge of the KNMI offers a sense of security to the Netherlands. Weather, the earth’s movement, and climate change are all constantly changing, so it is important that the website knmi.nl is reliable and can handle high peak loads when there are important events related to climate or seismology.
The challenge of this project was to migrate the infrastructure of the website knmi.nl from an on-premise environment to a scalable environment in the cloud within a very short period of time. The environment had to be set up in such a way that it could almost literally move with the weather. When there are important atmospheric or seismological developments and the number of website visitors increases rapidly, the knmi.nl must always be available and perform well. Another requirement of this project was that the migration from the old to the new environment had to be done with minimal downtime.
A website that is expected to suddenly have a lot of visitors must be set up to be scalable and highly available. The infrastructure is set up on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The application was chosen to run in Docker in a scalable cluster, using the AWS Service ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service). The cluster runs simultaneously in different data centers and is set up to continue running when there are problems in a specific data center.
To ensure fast site speed and a pleasant user experience, a Content Delivery Network was used. This allows for use of data centers that are close to the users, resulting in fast load times. Both the application and the infrastructure are fully deployable through a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) environment.
From weeks to minutes! Thanks to the migration to the cloud, everything is fully cloud-based and a deployment is available within 20-30 minutes. "Rollback" is possible through ECS, so that any errors can be immediately corrected. The environment is also now fully documented, making it easy to work on it with various teams over a longer period of time. The AWS migration therefore prevents errors and saves time and money.
“This can’t be done by a simple website builder, but it can be by a Kabisa/Cloud Legends engineer.”
Weert (HQ)
Marconilaan 8
6003 DD Weert
Amsterdam
Daalwijkdreef 47
1103 AD Amsterdam
Eindhoven
Kastanjelaan 400
5616 LZ Eindhoven
