Achieving 99.999% Availability by Migrating Microsoft Workloads to AWS with Avionté

Avionté provides a software-as-a-service platform that connects people with work. Today, its products serve over 1,800 staffing agencies across the United States and Canada, with around 250,000 users. In 2022, Avionté processed 4.6 million W2 forms and 15 billion dollars in payroll.

In 2021, Avionté decided to migrate from its collocated data center to the cloud to improve its scalability and stability for customers. Though it runs many Microsoft-based services—including Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL Server, ASP.NET, and Windows Remote Desktop Services—and considered other cloud providers, it chose AWS because AWS is technology agnostic. “AWS embraces any technology,” says Odell Tuttle, chief technology officer at Avionté. “The AWS vision for future growth and innovation is, to me, unmatched.”

Within just 2 years, Avionté migrated 550 virtual hosts and several petabytes of data to AWS. “We were at a pivotal moment where big changes had to happen,” says Tuttle. “We moved quickly, and the AWS team moved quickly with us through the complex challenges we had to solve.”

As Avionté migrated, its customers immediately experienced an improvement in the performance of Avionté’s services. “The migration to AWS has made a remarkable difference, and we are already starting to see it in our net promoter score,” says Tuttle. “The issues related to availability and performance have largely dropped off the radar altogether, and now, we’re focusing on innovation and helping customers get to the next level.” On AWS, Avionté achieved 99.999 percent availability, which wasn’t possible in its collocated data center. Its average response time for web traffic is 80 ms, and it improved its mean time to recovery.

Both AviontéBOLD and AviontéCLASSIC are .NET-based and built on Windows Server, SQL Server, and C#, all Microsoft-based products. AviontéCLASSIC was built on a remote desktop protocol–based architecture, while AviontéBOLD is a more modern, browser-based application with a multitenant data architecture. On AWS, they both run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, specifically using Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server and Amazon EC2 for SQL Server. To persist its remote desktop protocol application content, it uses Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, fully managed file storage built on Windows Server. Avionté also uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a simple-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon EC2. “Services such as Amazon EC2 for Windows Server, Amazon EC2 for SQL Server, and Amazon EBS are our bread and butter, along with the configurability, elasticity, and monitoring and observability of those services,” says Tuttle. “The foundational items—security groups and the portal and management plane of the AWS infrastructure—give us the tools we need to manage everything that we’re doing.”

Avionté has a large data footprint, storing hundreds of millions of documents on behalf of the staffing agencies that it serves. The company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service, which provides the disaster recovery and document preservation capabilities that Avionté customers need to comply with industry regulations. For additional disaster recovery and cost optimization, Avionté is moving more of those documents to Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which provide long-term, secure, durable storage for data archiving. On AWS, Avionté can also comply with SOC 2, a security compliance standard for protecting customer data, which was an important requirement for the migration.

Now that Avionté is on AWS, it spends less time on infrastructure maintenance and can begin innovating and modernizing in ways that weren’t possible in the data center. The team already built an entirely new API-as-a-service solution that runs using Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service to create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale. It has also created integrations for many third-party programs that its customers use. “We have 70 engineers who are now super excited about pushing from a build-it-yourself mode to using AWS,” says Tuttle. “Now that the migration is complete, they’re looking at the services they have available in the cloud and which ones they can take advantage of.”

Avionté is particularly looking to build generative artificial intelligence capabilities into its solutions. Avionté has begun a proof of concept using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundational models. It is looking to use two large language models, Titan Embeddings and Anthropic’s Claude, to act as copilots to assist recruiters as they match workers to job postings.

As the workplace continues to change, Avionté has embraced the cloud so that it can meet the changing needs and expectations of workers and agencies. “We’re adding more capabilities for agencies, employers, and the talent that interacts with them,” says Tuttle. “The way workers interact with employers is changing, and we’re adapting our tech stack to make that more fluid.”

To do this, Avionté will continue to modernize its monolithic applications into modular architecture on AWS. It is specifically looking to modernize its databases from using SQL Server to using purpose-built databases on AWS, and it is already using AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET, which simplifies the process of re-architecting older monolithic applications into smaller code projects to build a microservices-based architecture. “We can use tools like AWS Microservice Extractor to better identify domain boundaries and carve them out using AI so that we can scale and operate our applications better,” says Tuttle.