Intraway Creates a High-Availability, Resilient, Multi-region Telecommunications Product on AWS

Intraway and its software as a service (SaaS) orchestration solution, Symphonica, lead in cloud-based, no-code automation open source software systems for telecommunications providers. Headquartered in the United States, Intraway also has offices in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. The company developed a high-resilience solution capable of operating across Amazon Web Services (AWS) multi-regions. Because of its innovative and disruptive approach, Symphonica provides new services faster with improved customer service quality.

The Intraway software-development company digitizes telecommunications operations and accelerates the implementation of new services, such as FTTH and OTT. In addition, it prepares networks for the deployment of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), and other technologies. Symphonica, a no-code provisioning and orchestration platform, is one of its products.

Intraway took on the challenge of offering Symphonica as a SaaS model. It also wanted to develop a platform that would provide mission-critical services that didn’t assume the risks and costs of deploying on a single infrastructure and could deploy in close proximity to its customers.

It was critical to find a cloud provider with performance that allowed Symphonica to run smoothly and also run on internet as a service (IaaS), in order to better adjust to market shifts and delegate operational work to experts who enforced the operational resilience required for a SaaS product. The product also needed to be multi-regional to better support its customers by providing them the option to select convenient regions and migrate without any downtime. In order to recover capacity quickly and migrate solutions to any region, as needed, Intraway also required a deployment plan.

Another critical factor was using a virtual private network (VPN), a key business enabler. Achieving total application control through the internal configuration of the VPN was critical for the deployment. Intraway would use SaaS components to boost efficiency and integrate the proprietary VPN solution in its overall application. It wanted to take advantage of a vendor experienced in handling complex networks.
 

"We deployed our solution on AWS because of AWS’s portfolio, expertise, and the exceptional availability that Intraway needs to run its products," shared Nicolás Giavedoni, Intraway's cloud operations manager. Today, six clients in Latin America and North America use Symphonica. It employs Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Intraway also uses several AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), and Amazon Route 53.

Intraway selected AWS because of its high availability, experience, and comprehensive product offerings. By activating on AWS in more than one region, Intraway could multiply the availability of its existing resources instead of dividing them.
 

In implementing the VPN, AWS made it more versatile. As a result, it is more resilient and Intraway is able to migrate it from one place to another without reconfiguration or generating a new customer certificate. There is also greater internal control over how the network is configured and operated.

Using Amazon EKS, Intraway has developed a container-based VPN as a service (VaaS) solution to simplify the management of connectivity and availability to on-premises infrastructure for customers. Deploying Symphonica over several networks in different regions was one of Intraway’s biggest challenges.

AWS helped Intraway integrate Amazon EKS with the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service to flexibly achieve VPN connectivity and minimize or avoid the need for configuration changes from its customers.

"We used to have a limitation: When we wanted to change regions, or make any modification, it ended up impacting our clients—and decreasing perceived service quality. So, we proposed to simulate the design of the AWS architecture, but with control on our side. From there we created VPN as a service, complemented by AWS services," explained Jonathan Prado, Intraway's cloud architecture manager.

AWS helped Intraway design a new architecture that provided the flexibility to build a VPN within the cluster to the router or the user's location. This delivers better quality and added services to clients, with a more advanced, evergreen version of Symphonica.

"Our infrastructure is based on Kubernetes. We can move to another region without affecting the service. We solved the VPN problem, which did not allow for migrating the same VPN configuration,” adds Giavedoni. “Or, if you changed regions, you had to cancel one network and register to another. The benefits are greater control and scalability. It can be replicated more efficiently. In the event of a disaster recovery, we can keep the same configuration. Of course, this positively impacts customer service."

The implementation allows for greater agility and innovation. It also optimizes operational costs and helps Intraway to grow its customer base.
 

With the VPN working, the company will seek to enter a model where it can have its private solution running in different regions and offer it globally. Intraway already has a presence in various countries, but its objective is to push its products to new markets.

Long term, Intraway plans to move all of its solutions to the cloud and adapt them to the same state-of-the-art architecture it created for Symphonica, using Amazon EKS.