Consolidating Multicloud Infrastructure by Migrating to AWS with Bonterra

Through strategic mergers and acquisitions, Bonterra has grown to become one of the largest social good software companies in the world, supporting more than 170,000 nonprofit organizations. However, that growth also led to a distributed technology footprint that spanned multiple environments.

“We run across three clouds and eight major programming languages,” says Nik Kozlov, senior vice president of cloud optimization at Bonterra. “Our footprint includes five data centers, with a significant load already on AWS, plus Azure and Heroku. The complexity of maintaining all this infrastructure can be quite intense.”

Bonterra wanted to consolidate its infrastructure onto a single cloud. The company began evaluating providers that could support that effort, focusing on AWS and Microsoft Azure. Through a thorough evaluation, Bonterra found compelling advantages in consolidating on AWS.

From a technical perspective, AWS was a good fit because 50 percent of Bonterra’s team already had AWS expertise and the company had 45 percent of its infrastructure already running there. Bonterra knew that by using AWS services it could have granular control over its workloads and quickly establish direct connections with one of its major data centers, offering reliable networking for large data loads.

From a business standpoint, Bonterra saw that AWS provided cost savings compared with Azure. Additionally, Bonterra found that with AWS vendor management would be streamlined thanks to AWS Marketplace, where companies can discover, deploy, and manage software that runs on AWS. “We discovered that more than 50 percent of our vendors were already on AWS Marketplace rather than Azure,” says Kozlov. “For us, this was a major deciding factor.”

Bonterra’s cloud migration required a careful strategy. The company needed to support eight programming languages across 18 different products, maintain hundreds of customer domains, securely manage large datasets, and keep down costs—all while meeting strict compliance requirements for handling payment data and sensitive information.

To jump-start the migration, Bonterra participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program. AWS MAP proved invaluable, helping Bonterra develop a comprehensive plan that would minimize disruptions to its nonprofit customers’ operations while maximizing cost savings. Ultimately, Bonterra was able to run its social impact software on AWS at a 60 percent lower cost than on Azure.

With its migration plan in place, Bonterra began implementing key AWS services. The company adopted AWS Direct Connect, the shortest path to any company’s AWS resources, to create a dedicated network connection between its largest data center and the cloud on AWS. That not only enhanced network reliability but also reduced network expenses by 50 percent for several key products. “AWS Direct Connect helped us optimize costs while maintaining the steady traffic flow we needed between our systems,” says Kozlov.

“We migrated the majority of our products to AWS within 8–10 months,” adds Kozlov. “This took hard work from many teams—software engineers, DevOps, operations—and everyone worked flawlessly together to successfully get our software into the cloud.”

Each of Bonterra’s 18 different products required its own secure environment and custom upgrade schedule. To gain better control over when and how to upgrade each application, the company deployed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—which is used to start, run, and scale Kubernetes without thinking about cluster management. Bonterra gained the granular control and isolation that it needs to securely run multiple applications across a diverse portfolio of products.

Bonterra also migrated its databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a simple-to-manage relational database service. The service automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. That migration simplified database management across multiple products while maintaining reliable data access for nonprofit customers.

To enhance security and streamline compliance processes, Bonterra implemented Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds. The service provides comprehensive logging and security features that simplify audit trails and compliance documentation, while its built-in security controls help protect customer data. By standardizing content delivery and security controls, Bonterra reduced its audit completion time from 3 months to just 1 week while maintaining rigorous security standards across PCI, SOC 2, and ISO certifications.

Bonterra has successfully completed its migration to AWS, going all in by retiring its on-premises data centers and moving off Azure. The company was also an early adopter of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence assistant. Bonterra is now using Amazon Q to enhance business processes and improve applications across its portfolio of products while facilitating deeper data analysis for nonprofit customers. By consolidating technical assets and data on AWS, Bonterra has been able to unlock advanced insights that help social impact organizations operate more efficiently.

Looking ahead, Bonterra plans to invest more resources in generative artificial intelligence and use its cloud infrastructure to accelerate innovation. With a standardized technology foundation on AWS, the company can focus on developing new features and capabilities that help nonprofits maximize their impact. Learn more about Bonterra’s journey in its re:Invent 2024 presentation.