Kabisa has established a high-availability and scalable cloud infrastructure for knmi.nl. The KNMI plays a crucial advisory role in society when it comes to atmospheric or seismological information. knmi.nl is a significant resource for individuals, businesses, scientists, policymakers, and administrators. While we may not precisely know the future climate, the knowledge provided by the KNMI gives the Netherlands a sense of security. The weather, movements of the Earth, and climate change are constantly evolving. Therefore, it is crucial for knmi.nl to be reliable and capable of handling high peak loads during significant events related to climate or seismology.
The challenge of this project was to migrate the infrastructure of knmi.nl from an on-premise environment to a scalable cloud environment in a very short time. The environment had to be set up in a way that it could almost literally move along with the weather. If there are significant atmospheric or seismological developments and the number of visitors to KNMI increases, knmi.nl must always be accessible and perform well. Another requirement for this project was that the migration from the old to the new environment had to occur with minimal downtime.
A website expected to suddenly receive a large number of visitors must be configured to be scalable and high-available. The infrastructure is set up using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The decision was made to run the application with Docker in a scalable cluster, utilizing the AWS service ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service). The cluster runs simultaneously in different data centers and is configured to continue running if there are issues in a specific data center.
o ensure a fast website and a pleasant user experience, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) was used. This allows the use of data centers located close to users, resulting in fast loading times. Both the application and the infrastructure are fully deployable through a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) environment.
From weeks to minutes! Thanks to the migration to the cloud, everything is entirely cloud-based, and a deployment is available within 20-30 minutes. “Rollback” is possible via ECS, allowing any errors to be corrected immediately. The environment is fully documented, facilitating collaboration with different teams over an extended period. The AWS migration prevents errors and saves time and money.
Creating a future-proof, reliable and safe infrastructure is a top priority. Therefore, we follow new technologies closely and are not afraid to use them if it benefits the end result.
