Streambased worked with The Scale Factory to move from GCP to a more robust and scalable solution on AWS.
Streambased is a unified event streaming data platform built for applications, data lakes, and AI systems. It empowers teams to quickly discover, trust, and activate streaming data with confidence and speed. Streambased Cloud is their SaaS product, offering a fully managed environment for customers to use without worrying about deploying and operating additional components themselves.
The Challenge: Getting Ready for Scale
Like most fast-moving SaaS teams, Streambased spent the first year or so of development focused on getting features in front of users, and finding commercial traction, rather than worrying too hard about day two operational concerns such as deployment automation, observability, etc.
Their product preview was deployed using a manual click-ops approach, into a single environment on Google Cloud’s managed Kubernetes platform. Now that they were seeing traction in the market, founder and CEO Tom Scott saw that it was time to invest in a more robust solution.
“Before this project, Streambased SaaS was stuck in Beta”, he told us. “The functionality we wanted was there but the operational aspects of a cloud service did not give us the confidence we needed for a full roll out. Our project with The Scale Factory gave us that confidence”.
AWS: The best choice for SaaS
Streambased chose to migrate to AWS as part of this work, with financial support for the project provided by Amazon itself.
“AWS has everything needed for this project under one roof”, Scott said, of their choice of cloud platform. “Not only can we use Amazon’s best of breed building blocks like EKS and S3 but we can also leverage higher level products like Amazon MSK and Amazon Bedrock to take the heavy lifting out of critical components. For instance, it is critical to our environment to have AI agents that are limited in scope and spend. Amazon Bedrock gives us these capabilities natively with minimal development effort on our side.”.
The Scale Factory: A trusted partner
As newcomers to the AWS platform, Tom knew that his team would benefit from some expert guidance, turning to The Scale Factory, an AWS partner with specific expertise in SaaS for this.
“The Scale Factory came very well recommended and right from the beginning did everything in a thorough and confidence inspiring manner”, says Scott. “I particularly appreciated the discovery workshops that ensured the delivery work was on schedule and exactly what we needed”.
With a strong track record delivering SaaS platforms on the AWS cloud, and our deep Kubernetes expertise, we were able to use some of our packaged solutions in order to get this project delivered quickly.
The Solution
We deployed our Foundational Landing Zone solution, to provide a starting point for centralised, secure cloud governance. New AWS accounts are created using AWS Control Tower, which uses Landing Zone Accelerator to customise them with an appropriate security baseline, which we designed with Streambased’s specific requirements in mind.
After that, we used Hashicorp’s Terraform to define and deploy application dependencies including Amazon Aurora, and Amazon EKS Auto Mode which delivers a production-ready Kubernetes cluster with minimal operational overhead.
Then we created Helm charts for the five services that make up the Streambased platform, allowing for fully automated, central deployment of these.
Finally, we added monitoring and observability, using CloudWatch Container Insights and Botkube, which can post monitoring updates into Slack for the team to see.
All of these components are deployed in both development and production environments across multiple regions, using centralised automation tooling, including GitHub Actions. We handed over the solution, providing documentation for the Streambased team to follow.
What Streambased said...
At every stage, The Scale Factory team has been super knowledgeable, practical, and flexible
Throughout the engagement they’ve taken the time to understand our particular requirements, and implement them in a way that even newcomers to the AWS world like us can understand and extend. I really appreciate the extra care and effort taken.
The Results
Streambased now have a robust, highly available platform, provisioned in multiple geographic regions to support the data residency requirements of their growing client base. The new platform is fully secured, keeping their customers’ data safe, and access to Amazon Bedrock means they’re ready to take full advantage of Generative AI features on the platform.
The automated provisioning work we delivered allows the Streambased team to deliver change quickly and safely into production for each of their customer tenants.
“At every stage, The Scale Factory team has been super knowledgeable, practical, and flexible”, Tom said. “Throughout the engagement they’ve taken the time to understand our particular requirements, and implement them in a way that even newcomers to the AWS world like us can understand and extend. I really appreciate the extra care and effort taken”.
