Reducing time to market with AWS

Matching talent to new job openings in Norway

AWS and its partner Basefarm have worked with Jobbmesse to establish a forward-looking, IaC-based solution, which manages the deployment lifecycle of Jobbmesse’s cloud-native applications on AWS. Jobbmesse was established in 2014 and engaged Basefarm as its operations partner in 2017. In early 2018, Basefarm migrated Jobbmesse’s IT platform to AWS, using IaC (Infrastructure as Code) as a foundation. In 2019, the solution was extended to embrace more agile DevOps practices and now provides continuous integration and auto-scaling to improve the efficiency of deployments and reduce the cost of operation.

The challenge

Jobbmesse became aware that user volumes would exceed the capabilities of their IT solution and require a new platform with the scalability to meet their future needs. Jobbmesse’s management, investors and customers saw optimisation and industrialisation of the solution as essential for the company’s current phase of growth. Security and compliance requirements were also evolving and the solution would need to continue meeting these.

One core requirement was the ability to scale the infrastructure up and then back down again in response to demand for the service during job fairs. By utilising a capacity-on-demand, consumption-based model, Jobbmesse aimed to safeguard the user experience while reducing the cost of operation.

Why Amazon Web Services and Basefarm?

The software developers at Jobbmesse selected AWS on the basis of previous positive experiences. Jobbmesse wanted to focus on its core, non-IT, activities, but of course could not afford to make sub-optimal IT decisions, so they sought out a trusted partner for advice and to build, operate and manage their services on AWS. Basefarm showed that they understood Jobbmesse’s needs and how they could be met on AWS. Through the company’s membership of the AWS Partner Network programme, Basefarm demonstrated their capability to advise Jobbmesse on their Cloud journey, and to operate and manage the AWS infrastructure on their behalf. Jobbmesse felt Basefarm was the right choice for their business and now rely on the company to run and manage their global, state-of-the-art platform in AWS.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Jobbmesse’s journey with AWS and Basefarm started in late 2017 with a workshop. This was soon followed by a migration project in which Jobbmesse’s application code was re-deployed to a new environment that Basefarm had created on AWS, using IaC. In simple terms, IaC defines the whole of the AWS infrastructure, resource by resource, in a set of templates, which are version controlled. Change is managed by updating the templates and applying them to the environment, causing infrastructure and other resources to be created, updated or deleted to match the templates. Changes can also be reverted by reapplying previous templates. By using IaC, management and operation of the environment is streamlined and automated, eliminating slow and error-prone manual operations.

Jobbmesse have been using this solution for around one year, supported by Basefarm’s Guided Operations service.

Continuous Integration Pipeline

In early 2019, through a new workshop, Jobbmesse and Basefarm began the process of extending their partnership further. On the agenda was the creation of a continuous integration pipeline for development, testing and deployment to production, in order to reduce friction in the software development and deployment lifecycle.

Reduced time to value

A framework for access management and authentication was established and automation of the IaC deployment was extended for all relevant operating environments. The application infrastructure was configured to utilise auto-scaling and the applications themselves were optimized to use cloud-native services and support the auto-scaling features. Thanks to IaC, Jobbmesse’s platform can be rapidly provided with new functionality, which can easily be tested in other environments prior to deployment.

Several new services, including chat, were also introduced in parallel.

Amazon S3, CloudFront and Auto Scaling

In consultation with Basefarm, Jobbmesse chose the Amazon S3 object storage service with industry-leading scalability, data availability, security and performance. Amazon CloudFront ensures the delivery of content to users through a globally distributed network of cache locations, providing simplified distribution of content such as video streams and large files. AWS Auto Scaling automatically adjusts capacity, in order to maintain stable, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost.

Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon EC2

Elastic Load Balancing services on AWS distribute incoming application traffic across a pool of Amazon EC2 instances or containers. The service processes several million enquiries per second. AWS Application Load Balancer and AWS Network Load Balancer are both used within Jobbmesse’s infrastructure environment.

AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy permits developers to easily deploy new versions of their application components to services in AWS, such as Amazon EC2 or Elastic Container Services (ECS).

Advantages

With AWS and AWS partner Basefarm, Jobbmesse has established a modern, IaC-managed platform which allows Jobbmesse to build and utilise cloud-native services across the globe. For Jobbmesse, the capability to scale automatically at several levels of the application stack was crucial for ensuring user satisfaction during peak periods, while minimizing cost off peak. Storage in Amazon S3, scaling with Elastic Load Balancer, commissioning of new code with CodeDeploy – AWS provides all of this and more, through a feature set that is unmatched by any competitor. Through this partnership with Basefarm and AWS, Jobbmesse’s future goals for international expansion will be easily met. Jobbmesse can rest assured that its applications and infrastructure will scale to service millions of enquiries per second, and that each transaction will be processed safely, securely and swiftly, within the platform delivered and managed by Basefarm on AWS.

About Jobbmesse.no/jobfaircenter.com

At jobbmesse.no and jobfaircenter.com, employers and jobseekers can meet at online job fairs throughout the world or at 24-hour fairs for individual companies. Dialogue on vacant positions takes place via chat rooms, teleconferences, web casts, webinars and/or email. Companies can also be contacted outside the job fairs and jobseekers can upload their CVs whenever they want. Jobbmesse also organises extraordinary real-world job fairs for which the applications play a key role.

“Management and investors wanted to establish a robust and secure IT solution as a basis for our international expansion. Key to this was automatic upscaling and downscaling in order to guarantee a good user experience. Equally, autoscaling would ensure that we didn’t pay for unused capacity.”

SVENN JAKOBSEN

– FOUNDER OF JOBBMESSE

“The user experience must be faultless. Immediate system response and new functionality are what count. Through AWS, Jobbmesse has secured a globally distributed solution with local access to large files without undue waiting times, along with a development environment that simplifies updates.”

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