TelSmart Calls Necko Technologies for Faster Development of VoIP Services Using AWS

Belgian Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) specialist TelSmart was struggling to keep its systems in step with growing customer demand. AWS Partner Necko Technologies helped TelSmart automate and scale systems using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, so TelSmart could focus on creating new services for customers. By migrating to AWS, the company was able to more rapidly integrate systems with a new partner and quickly launch a new mobile service. Development processes are now faster and customer retention has improved.

TelSmart is an innovative Belgian provider of easy-to-use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services designed for small and medium-sized business users. The company was struggling to keep its on-premises systems running without impacting customer service, and infrastructure issues were taking up a lot of staff time. It also wanted to launch a new service, which required multiple data centers—adding even more complexity and expense.

Growth accelerated with the rapid shift to home and remote working caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So the company decided it was the right time to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We’re a small team and we didn’t want to hire more people just to deal with our storage and database issues,” says Maarten Ureel, Chief Technology Officer at TelSmart. “We want to focus on software, and making cool services for our customers. Also, we need to run and support these systems 24/7, so that meant working nights to upgrade infrastructure.”

The TelSmart team talked to several companies but found that sales representatives often made promises that the technical teams could not deliver. It was concerning that any decision they made could quickly become redundant as the company continued to grow—it has averaged 50 percent revenue growth every year for several years.

During this research period, TelSmart met with AWS Partner Necko Technologies. According to Ureel, from the very first meeting, it was clear that Necko was a good fit. “They were obviously developers just like us,” he says. “They understood what we needed and were honest about what we needed to do.”

Necko advised TelSmart that, while a straight lift-and-shift migration was possible, it would have been expensive and provided limited improvements. Instead, it suggested re-engineering some services, and building automation in wherever possible to get the maximum benefit from the migration.

An initially planned cutover migration was abandoned due to load issues with certain telecom devices. Instead, Necko and TelSmart created an automated script to move customers one at a time from the on-premises multi-tenant servers to AWS. That allowed the teams to closely monitor the impact on internal software, and make sure that all components worked smoothly.

Now, TelSmart can add compute capacity instantly to scale automatically using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. “I can go from 4 servers to 20 in seconds, and all the rest of the infrastructure scales up automatically—we don’t have to do anything but type the number 20 in a box on a web page,” says Ureel.

TelSmart must keep call data for a certain period of time in case of billing disputes, so its storage requirements grow by 1.5 million calls per month. By running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and uses Amazon Athena, an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

Since moving to AWS, TelSmart has seen customer retention go up as service levels have improved. Using AWS, it can easily create a test and production environment, so development is much faster. “The idea-to-production stages used to take us around 3 weeks to a month,” says Ureel. “Now, if it’s fairly simple, we can do it in 2 days.”

Using two separate environments has improved TelSmart’s security and its testing capabilities. Creating truly identical environments for testing and production is almost impossible, so it is reassuring for developers to have a full test environment. There is also less need for extensive testing or scheduling of updates.

In addition, the company has eased management overhead by reconfiguring components that previously ran on virtual machines to run in containers instead.

Although some costs, like those associated with databases, have gone down drastically, it is the flexibility and ease of scalability that is most important to TelSmart. Working with Necko, the company has conducted a proof of concept to automatically scale down at night when demand falls.

While saving costs was never the real driver of the project. The aim was to provide stronger disaster recovery to allow the launch of new services with a partner, a project that would otherwise have required two data centers. The other main goal was to accelerate development and free up staff time. “In pure billing terms, we are not seeing a savings yet in our monthly invoice,” says Ureel. “But we are saving so much in other terms—we just don’t have to think about infrastructure. We don’t need more people to deal with overnight upgrades, we’re more stable, and developing faster.”

TelSmart uses AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), an open-source software development framework, to define and provision its cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. Ureel said, “Necko helped us tremendously by onboarding us to AWS CDK and getting us going, so that our ops guys are now CDK masters.”

Using infrastructure as code has helped TelSmart to streamline its lab and production environments. It also provides a clear revision history to view changes to code and made it possible to build an easy-to-manage zero-trust security model.

TelSmart worked closely with Necko and really appreciated how it shared its knowledge around running and developing the systems while still providing support when needed. “It was a real pleasure working with TelSmart—they’re fast learners, and we’re still in touch,” says Jérôme Dauge, Co-Founder of Necko Technologies. “We talk regularly and we’re there in the background if they need us. It’s great when there is true collaboration between two companies.”

TelSmart’s faster speed of development has aided its preparations for the imminent new launch of its co-branded mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).

Using AWS, TelSmart has been able to ease the necessary integration with its partner’s systems, and found it easier to prepare for the required ISO certifications, including ISO 27001.