Cocoflo Drives the SMART City Movement Forward with the Deployment of AWS Microservices

Background

Cocoflo is a fast-growing Canadian tech company at the forefront of the SMART CITY movement. They were founded with a vision to help strengthen communities by improving the citizen and municipal administrative experience with a platform that connects community stakeholders through dynamic digital engagement. With one unified platform, their goal is to help the community achieve an effective collective communication flow (co-co-flo) – they are your VIRTUAL CITY HALL.

The Challenge

Security and data privacy is critical for any organization, but for Cocoflo who provides dynamic two-way communication between municipalities and citizens, it is imperative that the best security and governance practices are in place to protect this highly confidential data.

Cocoflo was looking for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner to help them establish an AWS cloud best practices foundation, as well as enable a robust and reliable microservices deployment and orchestration framework, leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Amazon EKS is a managed container service used to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.

As Cocoflo continues to grow and onboard new customers, their AWS cloud platform is critical in helping them become more agile and innovate faster. Cocoflo’s customers have varying data isolation requirements, and Amazon EKS provides Cocoflo with the ability to easily meet differing security and segregation requirements of any municipality they onboard.

Our Solution

At OpsGuru, accelerating cloud-native adoption is the driving force of the company. Cocoflo leveraged OpsGuru’s Cloud Launchpad service to build a scalable cloud foundation, establishing the necessary AWS security and governance best practices foundations. Cloud Launchpad’s multi-faceted approach helps businesses move to the cloud rapidly and securely, reducing common errors companies experience when establishing their cloud foundations. “We have spent years developing and testing our proprietary cloud adoption solutions and provide not only a technical solution, but programs to steadily build client technical proficiency,” Dave Lindon, General Manager at OpsGuru says.

The Amazon EKS-based solution designed by OpsGuru provides Cocoflo with the ability to rapidly deploy isolated versions of their single-tenant application in an automated and repeatable fashion using industry-standard Helm releases and Flux, the popular third-party tool for managing GitOps workflows. The solution limits redundant infrastructure and gives the company an efficient way to scale while keeping costs down. Additionally, knowledge transfer sessions led by OpsGuru ensured the Cocoflo team have the critical information needed to manage their cloud environment efficiently and independently. As part of this service, OpsGuru produced a set of operational playbooks and documentation covering AWS best practices, cloud design, and cloud operations.

The Result

The containerization of Cocoflo’s AWS environment moves the company one step closer to executing its goal of delivering community-centric solutions to municipalities. The team met its key business goals of successfully scaling with growing user demand – rapidly and securely onboarding AWS while adhering to AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices.

“As Cocoflo continues our rapid growth trajectory, it is essential that we align with partners that are not only best in class, but that share our vision for a better future. Our partnership with AWS & OpsGuru is pivotal to Cocoflo fulfilling our growth objectives. We look forward to continuing to work with AWS and Opsguru. Together we are championing SMART CITY evolution and making Cocoflo’s Virtual City Hall an industry standard,” said Bernie Florido, CEO and Founder at Cocoflo.

The steep learning curve and rapid evolution makes Kubernetes adoption challenging, even for experienced teams. In making the decision to partner with OpsGuru and leverage Cloud Launchpad, Cocoflo eliminated the complexities inherent in cloud adoption and tapped into a set of best practices that will see them through the exciting times ahead as they scale the heights of the SMART CITY movement.