Dectris builds a data processing SaaS platform with The Scale Factory and AWS.
Founded in Switzerland in 2006, Dectris is the world leader in high performance X-ray and electron detectors for science and industry, advancing scientific research across the globe. Their hardware was key to understanding the COVID-19 virus: 139 out of 160 coronavirus structures were identified with Dectris’ EIGER and PILATUS detectors.
Detectors like this generate multiple gigabytes of data per second, all of which needs to be processed by, effectively, a small supercomputer deployed on their users’ premises.
As these customers start to move their own workloads to the cloud, they’ve begun to ask for cloud solutions to this heavy compute challenge. The challenge here: how do we take a compute heavy on-prem workload and migrate this to AWS?
Assessment
Through workshops with the Dectris team, and an exploration of their customers’ existing on-prem environments, we conducted a comprehensive discovery exercise. We identified the assets that would need to be migrated, and established both functional and non-functional requirements - in particular, requirements for data retention and compliance, and the need to be able to scale up to huge amounts of data.
It was important to the customer to unlock the full benefits of the AWS platform when migrating, and so we designed a target architecture that would make the best use of modern container technology such as AWS Fargate.
From the design, we were able to show the total cost of ownership of the platform over 3 years, to help Dectris understand their return on investment.
Also using this target design, Dectris were able to take a proposal for a cloud-based offering to their existing customer base to gauge interest, before committing to building anything.
Mobilising and Migrating
As part of the path to production, we built a landing zone using AWS Control Tower to support central account management and governance. Dectris have users all around the world, and each country has its own compliance and data sovereignty requirements. Some resources are shared across tenants, and some are unique to a customer. Control Tower makes it possible to meet the needs of the entire customer base without this complexity slowing things down.
As well as tight governance, the production workloads also require good practices like disaster recovery, infrastructure as code, and automated CI/CD processes to deliver software changes without incident, and we’ve delivered all of these.
Dectris developed an edge device called a “hub” to run on the customers’ site. Managed using AWS IoT Greengrass V2, the hub preprocesses and buffers data before streaming it into an S3 bucket.
From there, on-demand and scalable High Performance Compute jobs, orchestrated by AWS ParallelCluster run to analyse and process that data. The HPC jobs access S3 data through FSx for Lustre which provides the high I/O throughput performance required.
Throughout the project, as well as Dectris’ engineering teams, we worked closely with AWS’ solutions architect and account management teams aligned to the Dectris account.
Customer Outcome
Dectris have achieved their goal of having an on-demand, highly scalable, high performance platform that is ready to meet their customers demands. This will provide significant savings for their customers as they no longer have to run on-premise infrastructure 24x7 to be able to run periodic jobs. With the flexibility of the AWS platform Dectris have the option of scaling compute resources to complete jobs quicker if required.
“We’ve had a tremendous experience with The Scale Factory”, says Max Burian, product manager for this solution. “Their work quality is outstanding, they deliver on time and really go the extra mile to meet our needs - even if we don’t know them yet. They are very adaptive and flexible from a scope, management and procurement perspective. We learn a lot every day and it’s a real pleasure to work with the team”.
