Pole Star Global works with Steamhaus to power reliable, agile maritime solutions on AWS

Pole Star Global, founded in 1998, is a leader in maritime intelligence and vessel tracking that focuses on reducing risk and optimizing trade efficiency. The company’s solutions help customers manage vessel registration and safety to routing, performance and sanctions, and cargo tracking, port arrivals, and illicit behavior identification.

Over the years, the organization had accumulated a sprawling infrastructure with multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and legacy systems including an on-premises VMware application environment. This led to cost inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities, creating an urgent need for a new technology platform. “We had some risk in our existing setup, and we knew we needed to modernize our applications for agility and resilience,” says Tim Durmush, Director DevOps, Pole Star Global. To meet this requirement, Pole Star knew it had to retire its legacy systems and fully exit its on-premises data centers. “We want to save money, fix security, modernize all the applications, and then get to a point where we can do zero downtime deployments,” says Durmush. To achieve these goals, Pole Star sought to collaborate with a technology company that has deep AWS expertise and a proven track record in cloud modernization. 

Pole Star found what it was looking for with Steamhaus, an AWS Partner that specializes in helping companies migrate business-critical applications to the cloud. Pole Star selected Steamhaus because of its ability to bridge commercial and technical relationships with AWS and customers, experience in designing best-practice cloud architectures and managing complex migrations, and collaborative approach. “Our role is to ensure that the migration not only meets technical requirements but delivers real business value,” says Katie Chamberlain, AWS Business Development Manager, Steamhaus.

Working alongside the Pole Star team, Steamhaus led a multi-phase engagement including a detailed assessment phase including a thorough discovery of applications, workloads, and deployment processes and an architecture design phase to focus on modernization and future-proofing. Steamhaus also managed the full migration from the Pole Star on-premises environment to an AWS Landing Zone, emphasizing a containerized environment using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) rather than a simple lift-and-shift, to ensure greater flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiency.

As part of the agreed design, Steamhaus implemented AWS Lambda for serverless compute, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable storage, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for managed database services, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for securely controlling access to AWS resources. For all infrastructure as code capabilities, Steamhaus used Terraform, with application deployments being handled via ArgoCD. Together, these AWS services enable Pole Star to modernize its application stack, automate deployments, and enhance security posture. Pole Star also took advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a program that provides tools to reduce costs and accelerate migration projects. 

By working with Steamhaus to fully modernize its application environment, Pole Star was able to decommission legacy systems, which will likely to lead to 30–50 percent infrastructure cost savings. The new environment also helps Pole Star ensure 99.99 percent uptime for its applications, 24x7. “We do business with banks and governments, so high availability is not optional for us,” Durmush says. “The majority of our systems are critical to our customers.Whether that’s as part of Safety of Life at Sea regulations, financial risk and compliance needs, government tracking services, or our newer predictive AI solutions, we simply have to be up 24x7.”

Pole Star has also increased its operational agility by modernizing on AWS, and it can now support continuous delivery and rapid innovation. “Our modernized AWS environment allows us to build resilience into our systems and simplify deployment so we can head towards our goal of zero downtime deployments,” says Durmush. Pole Star has also increased its operational agility by modernizing on AWS, and it can now support continuous delivery and rapid innovation. “Our modernized AWS environment allows us to build resilience into our systems and simplify deployment so we can head
towards our goal of zero downtime deployments,” says Durmush. The application targeted for this engagement would receive key updates once a year. Now Pole Star is releasing updates and enhancements multiple times per day and it can deploy new application environments in 15 minutes instead of 12 hours." “By modernizing on AWS, for this application we’ve moved away from a sort of 1990s waterfall methodology and into the 21st century." 

Pole Star plans to continue working with Steamhaus to modernize and optimize its application environments on AWS and complete work on an AI-powered data lake based on Amazon Bedrock. “Our engagement has been great so far, and we’re looking forward to building out our strategic relationship together in the next few years,” Chamberlain says.