Enhancing Developer Productivity Using Amazon VPC Lattice with Controlant

Founded in 2007, Controlant provides monitoring solutions for pharmaceutical companies, helping minimize the risk of loss or spoilage. “Many pharmaceutical products, such as vaccines, require a constant temperature range to ensure they remain effective and safe to use,” says Árni Brynjúlfsson, DevOps team lead at Controlant. “Controlant’s solutions track the entire product lifecycle in near real time. Our goal is to make the pharmaceutical supply chain zero waste, meaning all products arrive at their destination ready to be used and there’s no throwing out medicines or vaccines on account of a deviation from the temperature range during transport.”

Over time, Controlant needed to manage a growing number of accounts and services. Initially, the company had four primary environments—for development, staging, user acceptance testing, and production—and different teams connected directly to these environments. Controlant then re-architected the infrastructure to provide each team with separate access to these environments. With eight domains, this meant that the company now had 32 accounts to connect up. Controlant required a more efficient way to manage this complex network.

The company began to explore different options within AWS and discovered Amazon VPC Lattice, a service that consistently connects, monitors, and secures communications between internal services. Amazon VPC Lattice’s powerful features made it an attractive solution for Controlant. “When you have services in different accounts and VPCs, they need to talk to one another easily and privately,” says Brynjúlfsson. “Amazon VPC Lattice provides a very clear path to accomplishing those goals.”

In only 2 weeks, Controlant integrated Amazon VPC Lattice into its network architecture. The company’s development team completed the implementation independently; after discovering Amazon VPC Lattice, the team read the service’s documentation and watched videos from AWS re:Invent to gain a deeper understanding of its capabilities and best practices. Thanks to these comprehensive resources and the development team’s expertise, the integration process was simple and seamless.

Using Amazon VPC Lattice, Controlant established a more streamlined and efficient network architecture. The company created a service network owned by the old sandbox account and then set up identical virtual private clouds (VPCs) across all accounts. Each team now has its own dedicated sandbox account as well as corresponding accounts for live, stable, and user acceptance testing environments. All these sandbox VPCs are connected to the sandbox service network, through which the teams can access and use all of the services published within that network. The same structure is replicated for the other environments, with each set of VPCs connected to their respective service networks. This architecture facilitates seamless communication between services while maintaining a clear separation between environments and teams.

The adoption of Amazon VPC Lattice brought several benefits to Controlant. First, there is simplicity of use—developers can publish, discover, and connect to services quickly across environments. Second, Controlant can onboard developers much faster, empowering the company to scale its teams and infrastructure more efficiently. The company can also access integrated security features through Amazon VPC Lattice, such as automatic encryption and identity-based access controls. With these capabilities, Controlant facilitates secure communication between services and can also reconfigure protocols as regulations or business needs change.

By migrating to Amazon VPC Lattice, Controlant also reduced network infrastructure code and implementation time by 90 percent. This decrease in code complexity made it much simpler for teams to create and deploy new services. Using Amazon VPC Lattice, the DevOps team reported a 90 percent reduction in the time required for developers to create and deploy new applications across accounts. As soon as an application is published, it is immediately available to other teams across the company.

Controlant has also realized substantial cost savings using Amazon VPC Lattice compared to its previous networking solution. “Using Amazon VPC Lattice, we sped up deployments of new applications across accounts, reducing network infrastructure code by 90 percent,” says Brynjúlfsson. “This amounted to an immediate cost saving of 61 percent.” As Controlant continues to scale up the solution, these savings are projected to increase to 83 percent.

Using Amazon VPC Lattice, Controlant simplified its network architecture and improved the developer experience. The company facilitated the secure integration of services across environments with minimal configuration. With a more agile and scalable infrastructure, the company can continue to focus on its mission of transforming the pharmaceutical supply chain.

“Our goal in creating the developer network is to support all reasonable use cases within existing accounts,” says Brynjúlfsson. “We aim to provide seamless connections and network connectivity between services in the same environment. This core functionality will be an integral part of our network.”