case study
Aligne trading platform
How we successfully migrated the Aligne trading platform for our client Luminus.
The Brief
Luminus holds the position of the second-largest electricity generator and energy provider within the Belgian energy market. They manage power plants and wind farms within Belgium while procuring electricity from external sources to guarantee their customers a consistent and reliable energy supply.
The Luminus trading platform, Aligne, is essential for making quick and informed decisions which are crucial for a successful energy trading platform. To overcome the challenges of managing and scaling the platform, the Cloud Elemental team migrated it from on-premise data centres to Amazon Web Services, resulting in numerous benefits.
Current pain points with the Aligne platform:
Application out of date and out of support.
No automation is available.
Limitation of application alerts and monitoring options.
Limited scalability with legacy data centre resources.
our approach
Our approach to the migration of the Aligne trading platform to the AWS cloud.ย
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Our Approach
Our approach to the migration of the Aligne trading platform to the AWS cloud.ย
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Enhanced Availability, Scalability and Security
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon Elastic Load Balancers decouple a complex, tightly-coupled Aligne application architecture across 6 EC2 servers. While the application does not fully support an Active-Active configuration ELBs still bring several benefits.
By utilising Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) we can create alarms and automation hooks to self-heal or automatically recover EC2s to a secondary Availability Zone in the event of an Availability Zone failure.
This helps to minimise downtime, optimise performance, and simplify infrastructure management for seamless application accessibility and user experience.
ELBs also facilitate encryption in transit by leveraging AWS Certificate Manager which hosts Luminus internal TLS/SSL certificates.
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
A highly available file system service, Amazon FSx configured for Multi-AZ replaces an on-premise Windows file server, the benefits are high durability and availability with automated backup, failover and patching ensuring any Security vulnerabilities are rapidly resolved.
Amazon FSx is also seamlessly accessible from on-premise, integrated with AWS Key Management Service using Customer Managed Keys ensures data is encrypted, fine-grained access is protected by the corporate Microsoft Active Directory and leveraging complementary services such as AWS DataSync to automate data archival to Amazon S3.
AWS Backup
AWS Backup is an Amazon native service automating data protection and backups supporting all storage services used by the Aligne project.
An operation backup vault is stored in the project account for local recovery, and the remote backup vault in a protected account is used for Disaster Recovery purposes.
An example of automated restores using AWS Backup is shown here. In the event of an Availability Zone (AZ) failure, we can automate the restore of EC2 servers to another Availability Zone, automating Active Directory Domain joining, DNS remapping and application.
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS improves on the existing on-premise Oracle-on-VM solution by reducing the maintenance, DBA overheads and downtime with both Operating System and database patching.
The Aligne project uses the Multi-AZ configuration with IOPs provisioned SSDs, automated failover, patching, and backups. With the move to AWS, the team have achieved higher availability and scalability while also reducing the Oracle licensing footprint.
self healing
Automated Self-healing is a bespoke solution to improve the Aligne applications availability, Aligne is a combination of over 40 Windows Services and supporting applications.
When a failure in the Aligne application is detected, from the Windows Service or specific errors in the application log files, an automated workflow is executed to attempt an application recovery.
The architecture is a series of complex, idempotent scripts and AWS infrastructure executing a Business defined recovery workflow to reduce application downtime and response times by clearly identifying the exact point of failure when an automated action is not suitable
Self Healing
Automated Self-healing is a bespoke solution to improve the Aligne applications availability, Aligne is a combination of over 40 Windows Services and supporting applications.
When a failure in the Aligne application is detected, from the Windows Service or specific errors in the application log files, an automated workflow is executed to attempt an application recovery.
The architecture is a series of complex, idempotent scripts and AWS infrastructure executing a Business defined recovery workflow to reduce application downtime and response times by clearly identifying the exact point of failure when an automated action is not suitable
Final Result
The migration of the Aligne application from on-premise to AWS has given the Luminus business and team more scalability, performance, monitoring and automation levers to tackle any challenges that come along. The Aligne application has seen an increase in performance of 20-30%, with higher data availability with reduced maintenance.
High Availability
Scalability
Resilience
Security
Fault Tolerance
Elasticity
Automation
Integrated Monitoring
Meet the Team
Meet the complete team that successfully migrates the Aligne trading platform.ย
Case Studies
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Anna Eriksson,
Senior Consultant and Solutions Architect
Anna is responsible for leading the DevOps Engineering team. She is the architect of the Self-Healing solution; Golden AMI pipeline; automated deployment of EC2โs with Active Directory joining, Luminus tooling license activation & registration and Amazon Route 53 integration. Anna ensured continual communication with stakeholders, mitigating any issues, presented solutions, proposals and recommendations to Infrastructure Architecture Workgroups and senior stakeholders, ensuring a successful outcome and client satisfaction
Moldir Baimagambetova,
Consultant and DevOps Engineer
Moldir is responsible for the build, test and development of the Terraform code to create the Aligne infrastructure. She integrated the Terraform GitLab code repositories with GitLab DevSecOps pipelines ensuring any Security vulnerabilities are identified before the infrastructure is created. Moldir was given a creative license to improve the high level designs of self-healing, Golden AMI pipelines, load balancing, monitoring, alerting and has introduced novel and elegant solutions to meet the challenging needs of migrating a complex Energy Trade Risk Management platform to AWS. Moldir ensured timely delivery to meet demanding milestones while ensuring the infrastructure and solution met our high standards.
Anna Eriksson,
Senior Consultant and Solutions Architect
Anna is responsible for leading the DevOps Engineering team. She is the architect of the Self-Healing solution; Golden AMI pipeline; automated deployment of EC2โs with Active Directory joining, Luminus tooling license activation & registration and Amazon Route 53 integration. Anna ensured continual communication with stakeholders, mitigating any issues, presented solutions, proposals and recommendations to Infrastructure Architecture Workgroups and senior stakeholders, ensuring a successful outcome and client satisfaction.
Moldir is responsible for the build, test and development of the Terraform code to create the Aligne infrastructure. She integrated the Terraform GitLab code repositories with GitLab DevSecOps pipelines ensuring any Security vulnerabilities are identified before the infrastructure is created. Moldir was given a creative license to improve the high level designs of self-healing, Golden AMI pipelines, load balancing, monitoring, alerting and has introduced novel and elegant solutions to meet the challenging needs of migrating a complex Energy Trade Risk Management platform to AWS. Moldir ensured timely delivery to meet demanding milestones while ensuring the infrastructure and solution met our high standards.
Moldir Baimagambetova,
Consultant and DevOps Engineer
