Equatorial Marine Fuel Logistics Company (EMF)

The client

Equatorial Marine Fuel Logistics Company (EMF), founded in 2000, is a major player in the bunkering industry, supplying and marketing bunkers to various vessels and offshore platforms globally. 

With a well-established reputation, EMF is among the top five bunker suppliers by volume at the world’s largest bunkering port, Singapore. The company manages its fleet of bunker tankers and owns two floating oil storage terminals.

The challenges

EMF faced several critical challenges within its existing Digital Ocean infrastructure. The legacy data centre, serving as the backbone of its operations, proved to be an increasing difficulty rather than an asset. Outdated and inefficient, this legacy data centre became a focal point for improvement as EMF sought to modernise its technological foundation.

The company also faced issues of poor performance. This not only hampered operational efficiency but also posed a potential risk to EMF’s standing as a leading bunker supplier. It became evident that a significant overhaul was imperative to elevate the performance standards.

EMF had also identified a weak security posture within its existing setup. The implications of inadequate security measures were far-reaching, potentially exposing sensitive data and compromising the integrity of critical processes. Adding to the complexity, the absence of managed services exacerbated the operational difficulties. EMF found itself grappling with issues that required immediate attention, leading to out-of-hours call-ups and disruptions.

Faced with these challenges, EMF identified the imperative for a migration from Digital Ocean to AWS. This move aimed not only to address the immediate concerns but also to lay the groundwork for a more agile, secure, and scalable infrastructure. 

As a Managed Service and 24/7 support provider an agency called Clickr Media referred us to EMF due to our lengthy experience with AWS migrations, managed service and 24/7 support. Having previously worked with Gaji Gesa and FortyTwo on similar projects. 

The solution 

Migration

We were in the perfect position to provide the best solution for EMF’s modernisation journey as Just After Midnight’s Singapore team has years of experience working with AWS cloud migrations and modernisation. Clickr Media also supported us with some of the design work for the new architecture. 

EMF’s migration journey involved four different environments – test, staging, production, and live. The infrastructure was containerised, leveraging Docker and Kubernetes for the application deployment to improve the scalability and performance of the application. 

Workloads were migrated to AWS, and domains were relocated under CloudFlare’s protective umbrella. The AWS Well-Architected Framework served as the blueprint for constructing the new AWS environment,  with features such as Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, and DDoS protection, AWS provides a robust security infrastructure that helps mitigate potential threats and vulnerabilities. 

AWS allows EMF to effortlessly scale its resources up or down based on fluctuating demands. This scalability ensures that EMF can seamlessly accommodate growth without compromising performance.

AWS also provides a global network of data centres with advanced infrastructure, enabling EMF to benefit from low-latency access to resources and high-speed data transfer, enhanced application responsiveness, crucial factors for ensuring a smooth and efficient user experience.

The incorporation of Cloudflare into EMF’s applications adds an extra layer of security, fortifying the digital infrastructure. By leveraging Cloudflare’s advanced security services EMF enhances protection against cyber threats. This implementation not only strengthens application resilience but also ensures a more secure online environment for both the organisation and its users.

To enhance security further, four AWS accounts were created, each dedicated to a specific environment and to ensure continuous operational stability.

Support 

With the success of the AWS migration, our 24/7 infrastructure support was put in place meaning any issues are picked up with an agreed SLA of 30 minutes and resolved within 4 hours.

As well as incident resolution, our global team of AWS-certified engineers take care of the regular patching of the Prod environment.

The results

• The migration project demonstrated impressive results within two months of initiating the first phase. 
• EMF achieved a more cost-effective and secure infrastructure on AWS, leveraging containerisation and well-architected practices. 
• The integration of 24/7 support ensures continuous monitoring and timely issue resolution. 
• The implementation of Cloudflare provides an extra layer of security to EMF’s applications.