Meet Our Customer
Founded in 2007, Foundant Technologies is a leading cloud-based Grant Lifecycle Manager (GLM) software developer based in Bozeman, Montana. Foundant provides practical, user-aligned cloud technology and expertise for funders and grant seekers who want to free up time to focus on their missions.
Challenge
When Foundant Technologies approached NorthBay Solutions, the company was at a crossroads. While there was massive opportunity – and demand – for their innovative GrantMaker Lifecycle Manager (GLM) and Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM) applications for the nonprofit sector, their technology infrastructure was holding them back. They needed help developing an application modernization strategy that would involve application modernization and migration from Rackspace to Amazon Cloud in order to take advantage of the unparalleled scalability and high reliability. They needed a partner who could provide AWS managed services, as well as AWS security best practices.
However, the vendor that Foundant had chosen to take on the AWS database migration service required a minimum of two weeks to make any hardware or configuration changes, and Foundant did not have the bandwidth internally to take on the migration. What Founded needed was an AWS managed services provider that could move quickly. Thus, they reached out to NorthBay Solutions in July 2020, and shared that they needed to be up and running on AWS by September. Moreover, they needed to know that moving forward, application modernization services could be done on the fly.
Vision
Foundant’s vision for their system is simple: Scale from hundreds of clients to thousands of clients in order to help make philanthropy easier for as many organizations as possible.
Solution
Foundant had a 14-year-old .NET based architecture which Amazon ECS did not support. It presented a significant, if not insurmountable challenge. Even the team at AWS had no experience with making a legacy .NET framework run in modern containers.
Never one to back away from a challenge, and well-known throughout the industry as a leader in Amazon ECS best practices, the NorthBay Solutions team found a way to reconfigure the Windows environment so that Foundant applications would work in a containerized environment. Next, the team set out to migrate and port the .NET application itself and the packages associated with it to Amazon ECS using the .NET migrator – something that nobody at AWS had ever seen done before. NorthBay Solutions utilized a Windows-EC2 based ECS, along with CodePipeline Custom Action & SSM Document to build the .NET code, as well as to create and push Docker images.
AWS Services
Benefits
In less than three months, the NorthBay Solutions team positioned Foundant for exponential growth by:
- Designing and implementing an AWS architecture for three AWS environments (beta, sandbox and production).
- Migrating four .NET Windows-based applications from Rackspace to AWS.
- Migrating approximately 400 GB of MySQL database from Rackspace first to AWS Aurora RDS to deploy ECR images, then to Amazon ECS using AWS continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.
And in the 45 days following the initial launch, Foundant did not submit any infrastructure trouble tickets and experienced a 30% increase in application performance. “We knew the team would need to be upskilled, and we accomplished that through NorthBay’s involvement. Our innovation culture has changed since all teams can now collaborate and share AWS best practices,” said Rob Smith, VP Engineering at Foundant.
