Accelerating Feature Release through a Centralized Global Network Using AWS Cloud WAN with Miro

Launched in 2011 as an online whiteboard, Miro has been a leader in the visual collaboration sector for over a decade. With 1,800 employees in 12 locations worldwide, the company now provides a visual workspace for innovation that helps teams of various sizes in 200,000 organizations to brainstorm ideas, collaborate, design and deliver products, and more.

Miro has been using AWS Transit Gateway since 2020. AWS Transit Gateway connects a company’s Amazon VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub. But as the company grew, engineers sought a scalable networking solution that required fewer manual configurations and greater visibility into traffic between regions. “We occasionally check out new AWS services and offerings and how we might use them,” says Harris Palaiologos, Miro engineering manager. “With the introduction of Cloud WAN, we saw a lot of potential benefits from the get-go. We knew that it would greatly simplify how we could maintain, build, and scale our network.”

After viewing a Cloud WAN demo at an AWS Summit, Miro’s engineers conducted a successful proof of concept, which helped them feel comfortable taking the next steps independently. “The team never had to contact AWS support, because the documentation, whitepapers, and resources were there to read and research,” says Palaiologos. “It is out-of-the box for skillful network engineers to do the work in a straightforward way.” Engineers identified all the network connectivity requirements and implemented simple network policies to centrally configure and automate network management and security tasks. In just 2 months, two network engineers fully completed the migration, resulting in a complete view of Miro’s global network. “It is set-and-forget for us, in a good way,” says Ilia Medvetchii, site reliability engineering manager at Miro. “It just works and scales, and that's it. It sounds too good to be true, but it's actually true.”

Using Cloud WAN, Miro engineers no longer have to support and maintain large numbers of static routes to manage network segments. In fact, Miro cut its static routes from 80 percent to 10 percent of routing. “It feels like we're managing the network as we would manage it in our data center, with dynamic route discovery,” says Palaiologos. “That makes it more comfortable and natural for engineers working with the network infrastructure.” Engineers have also simplified how they make changes through infrastructure-as-code workflows. “Instead of managing multiple CPUs, routes, gateways, and attachments, we combine everything under the umbrella of one Cloud WAN module in Terraform,” says Medvetchii. “We have reduced the operational costs that result from engineering efforts. We don't have to put as much effort into managing our network as we used to, and that makes us more agile and helps us to move much faster.”

For example, engineers were able to quickly support an internal Miro features team that needed to create six AWS accounts to deploy a new microservice. “We helped them spin up their infrastructure in a very short time,” says Palaiologos. “Using Cloud WAN, we have one-click VPC deployment in 30 minutes, when it previously could take us 3 days to get connectivity. Now it's really fast and really simple.”

Because Cloud WAN generates a complete view of Miro’s on-premises and AWS networks through a central dashboard, engineers are better able to monitor network health, security, and performance. ”It does everything to manage our network that required us to use multiple other things in the past,” says Medvetchii. In addition, engineers anticipate that the use of Cloud WAN will simplify disaster recovery, since it’s faster to set up the infrastructure network layer, recover the data, and set up related essential services.

Additionally, Miro wanted to provide its customers—primarily in the United States and Europe —with data residency options. “Using Cloud WAN, we are confident that we can maintain our policies for not moving traffic between production regions,” says Palaiologos. “So it did have the additional benefit of greater control over security in network connectivity.”

Since the migration, Miro’s operation has grown to include 17 Cloud WAN segments and more than 20 VPCs primarily across AWS Regions in Europe and the United States. As the company continues its global expansion, it plans to increase its use of Cloud WAN, which has increased its limit from 20 to 40 segments per core network. With the time saved by off-loading networking infrastructure management, Miro engineers plan to explore additional authentication and verification services, such as zero-trust initiatives like AWS Verified Access, which helps companies provide secure access to corporate applications without a VPN.

The migration to Cloud WAN has contributed to a change in mindset for Miro engineers. “Instead of managing multiple pieces of one thing from different places, we’re managing the whole solution from a single point,” says Medvetchii. “We have this all-in-one solution, and it’s easier to process and manage.”