NeuroSYS Speeds-up AR Training Solution Delivery Using Hostersi and AWS

Polish software developer NeuroSYS builds IT solutions specializing in artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR). The company was developing a new industrial knowledge sharing and remote collaboration system called Nsflow when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, prompting travel and work-from-home restrictions.

The Nsflow system allows businesses to test new industrial equipment remotely using AR, eliminating the need for in-person visits. As remote working surged during 2020 so did demand for solutions like Nsflow. But the high demand brought new challenges: the company didn’t have the ability to scale up and create the testing and production environments it needed to serve its new customers. In addition it struggled with latency issues as it tried to deliver high-quality media content.

NeuroSYS already had plans to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its virtual private server (VPS) hosting solution. As demand for its product grew, it turned to AWS Partner offering consulting services, Hostersi, to accelerate those plans.

The Nsflow system consists of multiple applications, including web, mobile, and AR. It lets users deliver interactive, step-by-step visual instructions remotely through a headset. The technology has been used in a diverse range of situations such as training forklift operators, as well as croupiers in a casino simulation.

NeuroSYS was planning a migration to AWS but the sudden rush of interest caught the company off guard. “We always intended to move our platform from VPS servers to AWS,” says Piotr Ziemba, head of development at NeuroSYS. “We had an in-house team of DevOps engineers but suddenly they were fully occupied so we decided to engage an external agency to help. That’s when we turned to Hostersi.”

Nsflow was running on a dedicated VPS server, which was slow, inflexible, and expensive. Ziemba explains that onboarding new customers was taking up to 8 hours because the company had to create separate environments for each new account.

In addition, the constant fear of running out of compute resources caused the company to over-provision servers, resulting in money wasted on unused hardware. “Our infrastructure was not optimized,” says Ziemba. “To serve new customers we would increase our resources significantly, which resulted in overprovisioning. Most of the time we were just paying to ‘heat the air’.”

Hostersi advised the company to migrate Nsflow’s node-based web app, RabbitMQ, and PostgreSQL databases to Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), to start, run, and scale Kubernetes.

The migration to AWS allowed Nsflow to quickly create new test and production environments. “Now customer onboarding time is down from 8 hours to about an hour,” says Ziemba. “We can create new environments quickly and easily reconfigure services to create the best solutions for our customers. VPS did not provide this flexibility, whereas with AWS we have it straight out of the box.”

The Nsflow system uses data-intensive files such as live video, schematics, holograms, and complex 3D models. These are used to provide remote support, to allow on-site technicians to connect with experts via a headset and receive real-time supervision to inspect industrial equipment, or for troubleshooting.

This type of content creates a technical challenge because the user experience is degraded if the videos and 3D models are slow and choppy. The further away users are located, the worse the latency issue can be.

To address this, Hosteri recommended using the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network service to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. “Amazon CloudFront helps us reduce the content loading times, regardless of the customer’s geographical location,” says Ziemba. “The AWS infrastructure’s global reach helps us provide high-quality services anywhere in the world by mirroring our environments in different regions.”

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) has made the Nsflow development team more efficient by shortening the development cycle for customer projects and reducing the time taken to resolve issues by almost two-thirds. CI/CD was a must-have to improve the development process but the team didn’t have the internal resources to build a proper process.

Hostersi helped NeuroSYS create and deploy CI/CD processes for Nsflow, which included static code analysis to ensure code is written to required standards, and integration tests to verify if the new code works with the existing applications. “Due to automated quality checks in the CI/CD processes, our development pace has improved significantly,” says Ziemba. “We are able to deliver 66 percent more functionalities in the same period of time. Code analysis and tests are executed more efficiently, which means we can deliver better quality updates with fewer iterations.”
 

The initial surge in demand for Nsflow was driven by industrial companies looking for digital tools that could help them continue operating during the travel restrictions that began in 2020. However, as these restrictions were eased, Nsflow customers have continued using the platform because it increases the productivity of their experts and saves on travel time and expenses.

Using AWS, Hostersi helped Nsflow to stay focused on developing its platform and servicing its initial customers instead of worrying about its infrastructure or cloud migration. “Hostersi and AWS have helped increase our ability to build a new and innovative product,” says Ziemba. “Before the migration, our DevOps team was overloaded with infrastructure maintenance—now they are focussed on delivering projects for new customers instead.”