Weever Apps migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to achieve greater reliability, helping it serve enterprise customers that expect 24/7 access to the company’s digital-forms-management solution.
At the same time, the company used AWS to implement an agile and flexible development process to maximize developer productivity. “Our developers need to be able to write code in a local environment—for example, on a laptop—with the ability to deploy that same code to production seamlessly,” says Garth Gutenberg, senior DevOps manager at Weever Apps. “We enable that capability using Docker containers to replicate the same functionality between the development tools and the production solution that runs in AWS.”
For example, Weever Apps uses Amazon ElastiCache in production, but when developing locally, developers use standard Redis. To enable a smooth transition, they use Redis inside of Docker containers for extended local development sessions. At deployment time, the application can use Amazon ElastiCache in the cloud without code changes.
Weever Apps also uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to logically isolate multiple development and testing environments from production services, while maintaining the flexibility to quickly and easily deploy code once it is ready. “We have environments for development, staging, production, and continuous integration,” says Gutenberg.
This environment supports flexible development scenarios, such as when developers are writing code locally and connecting to a development database on AWS. “Using AWS and Docker, it’s easy to enable developers to be productive anywhere without having to manage the full production database,” concludes Gutenberg. “It’s a true hybrid scenario that helps us get features to market faster.”
Learn more about running Docker on AWS.