The client
Vintrace are three friends, Joshua, Jamie and Zane. Together they co-founded Vintrace in 2007, with the intention to build a world leading, cloud-based winery software platform that could be used by individual winemakers and larger wineries anytime, anywhere.
From the grape growing on the vine, to a freshly labelled bottle of Pinot noir, Vintrace’s software allows winemakers to fully track their processes. With offices in Australia and North America, they support wineries found in all the major wine regions globally.
The challenge
Vintrace were looking for a Cloud partner who could seamlessly integrate with their team and help them to leverage the benefits of AWS Cloud. In particular; scalability, cost optimisation, and security. Every year Vintrace’s platform has two large peaks in usage, during harvest season in the Southern Hemisphere between February – April, and then the Northern Hemisphere in August – October.
Joshua, CEO of Vintrace, approached Just After Midnight to help improve and manage Vintrace’s AWS cloud infrastructure. As part of Vintrace’s managed hosting requirement, Joshua also wanted 24/7 support for his team in the US, so that they felt they had a team they could go to in their time zone to help resolve issues.
The solution
At JAM, great cloud support is what we do best, we understand when managing an existing infrastructure, it’s vital to know all the ins and outs of how it has been set up, the rules that keep it running and where all the bodies are buried (so to speak!). When we onboarded Vintrace we catalogued their entire inventory of global infrastructure so we could review what they had in place, to fully manage it and keep it in a healthy running state.
As an AWS Advanced Partner, we conducted a Well-Architected Review to get a baseline across the 5 WAR Pillars, to identify where the optimisation opportunities lay. Focusing on security and cost, as well as performance reliability. By conducting six-monthly Well-Architected Reviews of Vintrace’s hosting infrastructure, we can ensure we stay ahead of the game as their platform develops and customer base grows.
During Vintrace’s peak usage periods during the wine harvests, JAM’s 24/7 monitoring and support means we can continuously watch the infrastructure and act if needed to ensure service continuity. By offering DevOps as a service to Vintrace, JAM can take care of the tasks Vintrace’s developers don’t have the time for, so they can remain focused on working on their software solution. With the use of AWS step functions, JAM automated patching across Vintrace’s fleet of servers, previously a manual task for the Vintrace team. This means their US team benefits from having a team available during their day to help with issues that can be quickly remediated, and they can continue with their work with no delays.
Results
- By having a 24/7 support team and Managed Services partner, who are confident, capable, security certified and AWS certified, Vintrace can increase its Enterprise client base. Being able to tender for larger globally distributed clients who have an increased support requirement, the expectation is on Vintrace to have a full support team available around the clock.
- Vintrace weren’t just looking for an MSP, what they wanted was a real cloud partner who would work alongside them to show them how to leverage cloud by following best practice methods and up to date learnings. As an AWS Advanced Partner, JAM is positioned to work as part of Vintrace’s team to provide expert advice on how best to structure their AWS cloud infrastructure to support their application as it evolves and find the opportunities to save costs and take advantage of the additional security features AWS offers.
- As a separate step for heightened security and potential threat awareness, JAM set up GuardDuty, now potential threats are mitigated in real-time.
"I sleep easily now knowing we've engaged a team who are able to support our team in the US and resolve issues quickly, at any time of day of night."