Terminix Accelerates Deployments from Days to Minutes, Achieves 99.999% Availability on AWS

With millions of customer accounts and hundreds of service centers to manage, international pest control company Terminix wanted to improve the availability of its digital infrastructure and modernize its security stack to be more resilient, scalable, and efficient in the cloud. The company had developed firewall technology based on its previous on-premises architecture. However, it needed a new solution that would increase throughput and be more resilient, reducing downtime and removing bottlenecks while simplifying the architecture. The company also wanted to speed up its time to delivery without reducing overall visibility.

Terminix turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a new, more modern cloud solution from scratch. Using Gateway Load Balancer—which makes it easy to deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual appliances—and other AWS services, the company drastically reduced downtime, improved scalability and bandwidth, and strengthened its security posture.

During the migration of existing systems to the new architecture, Terminix is building solutions using the new model on AWS. “There were a couple of scalability and failover issues in the old design,” says Bryant. “Using Gateway Load Balancer solved these challenges.” Using this service, the company was able to increase overall throughput by 300 percent. And by using AWS Transit Gateway alongside it, Terminix has successfully configured failover and achieved 99.999 percent availability. Now, the company is no longer susceptible to VPN failures; it has increased its resiliency to failures by 100 percent. “There’s much more stability in our environment on AWS,” says Bryant. “Using Gateway Load Balancer, there’s virtually zero chance of an outage.” Although Terminix still experiences rare outages due to human error, it’s now simpler and faster to recover.

Automatic connection monitoring is another benefit of Gateway Load Balancer. Previously, it took 30–60 seconds to detect a failure and implement failover, during which time a portion of traffic was impacted. Now, firewalls run in load balanced pools where Gateway Load Balancer can automatically detect failures and route traffic around them in 10 seconds—reducing time to recovery by up to 83 percent. The combination of greater segmentation, better scalability, and higher availability has increased productivity and optimized costs. Terminix also uses AWS CloudFormation, which lets users model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources by treating infrastructure as code, to build more quickly. “Onboarding a new component used to take days,” says Bryant. “Now we can do it in minutes on AWS. It’s like magic.” With separate production and nonproduction environments, developers no longer have to wait days for approval before testing changes in lower environments. Now, the wait time for approval is just minutes. “Our developers love having a dedicated test environment with full supporting infrastructure,” says Bryant. “They can iterate more quickly.” As a result, the company can achieve a faster time to market.

Terminix is using Gateway Load Balancer to transition from a multitiered architecture into an application enclave architecture. Because each application family is self-contained on this simpler model, the company’s security posture is stronger. The company can potentially limit the extent of a security event to a single application, isolating an incident while the rest of its infrastructure remains available. On AWS, Terminix has achieved higher performance while reducing costs and simplifying its workload in the cloud. 

Terminix continues to migrate the remaining parts of its legacy stack to its new model. After the success of its transition to Gateway Load Balancer and AWS Transit Gateway, the company is also planning a considerable migration of data from on-premises storage to a cloud data lake. “We’ve built out our cloud architecture and proven its benefits,” says Bryant. “We can run our business more efficiently and handle orders-of-magnitude more throughput on our new model on AWS.”