Kloia Leads Modernization on AWS to Help Epos Now Deliver a New API Environment

Kloia worked with Epos Now to modernize its application environment on AWS, roll out software features in one day instead of three weeks, and scale more easily to accommodate international expansion. Kloia, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, helped Epos Now move part of its Windows environment to Linux and .NET Core running on AWS. Epos Now uses Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway to more efficiently manage and scale its internal and customer-facing application.

More than 30,000 restaurants and retail businesses use Epos Now Point of Sale (POS) software to run their businesses every day. Epos Now is a leading provider of cloud POS software for retail and hospitality, helping organizations manage sales, inventory, reporting, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Although Epos Now had been running its Windows–based API environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company needed more scalability to meet customer demand. “More developers are using our web API to build integrations on top of our POS solution,” says Josh Hart, Cloud Architect for Epos Now. “Unfortunately, we had a monolithic .NET Framework API running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Windows Server, and it was slow to scale and challenging to manage because it wasn’t built with modern tools.”

Additionally, the company wanted to make software deployments more consistent. “It is risky making enhancements because one change could impact the entire application,” says Dan Wilkins, Head of Development for Epos Now. “We need to do everything through a central API for more consistency.”

To solve its challenges, Epos Now engaged Kloia, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to help modernize its API environment. Kloia is also an AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Partner, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, and an Amazon EC2 for Service Delivery Partner. “We knew Epos Now would benefit from modernization because of the company’s monolithic architecture, which made everything difficult to manage and deploy,” says Derya Sezen, Cloud and DevOps Consultant for Kloia.

Kloia worked closely with the Epos Now team to move from Amazon EC2 for Windows Server to the Linux operating system and from .NET Framework to .NET Core. Kloia also decoupled the Epos Now API into a microservice architecture that runs on Kubernetes clusters managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Kloia also deployed AWS Lambda serverless functions, along with Amazon API Gateway for easier creation and maintenance of secure, scalable APIs.

The decoupling of the application architecture gives Epos Now a single business logic layer and the ability to independently deploy services for better scalability and more efficient development.

By modernizing its API, Epos Now has a more efficient way to create and deploy its software. “The single business logic layer means we have a single source of truth through our API,” says Hart. “As a result, our developers will only need to update the logic in one place, as we continue to modernize other areas of the solution. This will make development and management much easier and code more discoverable to developers.”

Relying on a single API on AWS, Epos Now can deliver more reliable code. “We are identifying and fixing code issues faster before moving into production,” says Wilkins. “We can track and build enhancements and features more consistently now, which will give our development partners more confidence in our API.”

Taking advantage of automated, more efficient software deployment, Epos Now teams can deliver enhancements to customers faster than before. “We currently have a three-week release cycle, which isn’t fast enough for customers,” Hart says. “By modernizing the API, we have started our journey towards releasing more frequently which means we can push out new features to customers when they need them, as opposed to when we can deliver them. The best practices Kloia implemented played a big part in our accelerated delivery. We have a DevOps approach to development now that we have modernized our Windows environment on AWS.”

Epos Now can scale its application on demand because of its move to .NET Core and Linux on AWS. “We have a growing user base, and now that we’ve addressed the difficult part of our technical solution, we can more easily support that growth,” says Wilkins. “Global expansion is easier for us now because we can automatically scale out our API layer as we grow the business. We plan to expand to across many different countries, and we can do that more effectively by running on AWS.”