Administration care and infrastructure design in AWS cloud for ZTM Warsaw

The Warsaw Public Transport Authority, a member of the European Association of Metropolitan Transport Authorities (EMTA) and the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), organizes and supervises public transportation in the Warsaw metropolitan area. It provides rides to residents of the metropolis of more than two million people and connects 33 neighboring municipalities with Warsaw. Every day, passengers take more than 3 million trips on public transportation. They can use many types of tickets, including the Common Ticket, honored by rail carriers, as well as in local bus lines, launched by ZTM in conjunction with local governments of Warsaw's suburban boroughs.

Characteristics of cooperation

Our cooperation began when ZTM's contract with the company that designed and so far maintained the client's infrastructure in AWS cloud came to an end. After a series of meetings with ZTM representatives, we signed a contract under which we completely took over the care and management of the infrastructure.

The Client's infrastructure supports two portals belonging to ZTM Warsaw: ztm.waw.pl and wtp.waw.pl. The sites are built on a popular CMS system within Auto Scaling Groups, connected via Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and communicating with RDS Aurora MySQL and Elasticache Redis databases. The infrastructure consists of a production environment and a development environment, which operate under separate accounts.

The work we have done so far has consisted of auditing the existing infrastructure, cleaning up the existing environment and implementing tools that guarantee reference to best practices and adequate to the required level of securing ZTM Warsaw resources. Together with the Client, we also decided to change the CDN (Content Delivery Network) system from Cloudflare to Cloudfornt, which really reduced the costs incurred by ZTM.

Below are selected tools used within the described infrastructure:

AWS WAF - infrastructure security

Amazon EC2 - stateful and stateless instances

AWS EFS - as storage for instances

Amazon RDS - database

Amazon SES - for email distribution

Cloudfront - for securing and streamlining client sites

Summary

Currently, we are coming to the end of the work organizing the existing infrastructure in order to prepare it for migration. Together with the Client, we are starting the next phase of work, which is the design of a new infrastructure, tailored to the demand, which will allow easy expansion in the future. Once the design work is completed, we will begin the process of migrating resources and building the designed solutions. So far, the result of our work has been the adaptation of the existing infrastructure to the best known practices, an increase in the level of security and a significant reduction in infrastructure maintenance costs. From the very beginning, we also provide the client with 24/7 administrative support for the entire infrastructure.

ANY QUESTIONS? CONTACT US

Read also:

• Migration of the properto.io system to the Azure platform based on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• AKS-based infrastructure for PartsClub and Automa.Net
• New azure cloud infrastructure for PORTA KMI POLAND