FIeldRoutes Migrates to AWS and Increases IT Elasticity for its Seasonal Business

Executive Summary

FieldRoutes FieldRoutes is a software solution that enables pest control and other field services businesses to optimize various aspects of their operations. Over 2,000 companies use FieldRoutes today to increase technician efficiency, streamline office management, evaluate performance, drive sales, and more.

FieldRoutes wanted to execute a lift and shift migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) away from a hosted environment in Arizona with the goal of improving elasticity, scalability, and cost-efficiency. The company decided to bring in ClearScale, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to ensure a successful migration and position FieldRoutes for long-term success on the cloud.

The Challenge

Prior to migrating to AWS, FieldRoutes was handling 40,000 transactions per second across 14 MySQL database servers, 14 application servers, and 3 file storage servers all located in an Arizona data center. However, FieldRoutes felt it was overpaying for its IT resources, especially given the highly seasonal nature of its business.

The company would experience major demand spikes throughout the year but wasn’t able to scale compute resources up and down. As a result, FieldRoutes had to provision resources for its busiest season, summer, and continue paying for those resources throughout the rest of the year. The team knew it had an opportunity to right-size compute resources.

FieldRoutes’ IT environment was also unstable from time to time and experienced occasional downtime incidents. The leadership team hoped that by migrating to the cloud, the company could take advantage of managed services or serverless architecture to mitigate downtime risk and maximize the overall performance of its IT infrastructure.

With these goals in mind, FieldRoutes reached out to ClearScale, knowing the cloud consultancy had a Migration Competency from AWS and significant experience in helping companies of all sizes move mission-critical IT assets to the cloud.

The ClearScale Solution

ClearScale first hosted discovery sessions with the FieldRoutes team to learn more about the company’s ultimate objectives. Based on those early conversations, ClearScale developed a robust Architecture Design Document in collaboration with FieldRoutes that described the company’s future-state solution in significant detail, and both sides came up with strong ideas for how to best leverage the AWS cloud.

For instance, FieldRoutes determined that adding a Disaster Recovery region to its cloud solution would boost overall uptime dramatically. ClearScale was tasked with implementing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automation to reduce FieldRoutes’ infrastructure management responsibility. The team used Terraform and Terragrunt to implement these updates.

In addition to incorporating IaC into FieldRoutes’ IT architecture, ClearScale developed a CI/CD pipeline to automate much of FieldRoutes’ application deployment process. ClearScale used both Jenkins and AWS CodeDeploy, a fully automated deployment service that integrates with many AWS compute services, including Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate, to equip FieldRoutes with important DevOps capabilities.

Next, ClearScale initiated the deployment phase with the development environment and then worked up to the production and DR environments. Throughout the process, ClearScale and FieldtRoutes performed testing to ensure the deployments were operating as expected. Both teams also executed right-sizing tasks to ensure FieldRoutes was only using compute resources it needed, regardless of fluctuations in service demand.

After completing all implementations and testing, ClearScale worked with FieldRoutes to plan the final cutover to AWS. ClearScale suggested multiple cutover dates in order to migrate customers over in batches over several weeks. By the end, all customers were migrated over successfully to the new environments in AWS and ClearScale was able to transfer all operating knowledge over to the FieldRoutes team.

Architecture Diagrams

The Benefits

As a result of the AWS migration project, FieldRoutes gained a well-architected solution on the cloud capable of auto-scaling with user demand and fulfilling all business requirements. FieldRoutes’ IT infrastructure can now flex with seasonal demand without incurring costs for unused resources. The company also enhanced the security, stability, and reliability of its IT infrastructure through its newly configured Disaster Recovery environment.

ClearScale’s cloud expertise was especially valuable for optimizing FieldRoutes’ performance on the cloud and ensuring the company got as much value as possible out of its IT assets. ClearScale also set FieldRoutes up to leverage other powerful AWS services in the future to develop new features, solutions, and products for end users. The field service software provider has what it needs to provide better services to end users and scale up in the years to come.