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Lara

Cloud Powered Portfolio Intelligence: Vestberry’s Platform Modernization

Vestberry, a portfolio intelligence platform for venture capital, upgraded its infrastructure by moving to AWS Cloud and embracing Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service. This shift streamlined their development process, allowing for faster and more efficient testing of new app features.

The Client

Vestberry is a portfolio intelligence platform tailored for venture capital investors seeking a data-driven advantage. It consolidates complex portfolio information under one roof and turns it into powerful analytics and insights. Trusted by top-tier funds like Atomico, Vestberry serves as a “single source of truth” for venture capital professionals to rely on when managing their portfolio or making investment decisions.

Challenge

With a limited background in containers and Kubernetes, Vestberry aimed to modernize their application infrastructure by shifting from a traditional deployment model to a containerized environment. This undertaking involved migrating their application to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and embracing Amazon’s EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

In addition to modernizing their infrastructure, Vestberry faced the challenge of establishing a streamlined development workflow. They sought the ability for their developers to effortlessly create and dismantle feature environments during the development of new application features. This requirement indicated a need for an agile and efficient process that allowed developers to rapidly iterate on features in isolated environments.

Technology Stack

AWS EKS, Aurora, SQS, S3, ECR
Terraform, Helm, Gitlab CI
Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, Loki

What we did

Vestberry’s infrastructure underwent a comprehensive transformation facilitated by our team. We utilized Terraform to establish a robust foundation in the AWS Cloud. The application was containerized, and Helm charts were crafted to streamline its deployment and management.

In line with Git flow principles, we implemented an efficient version control strategy. Additionally, a GitLab CI pipeline was established to automate the deployment and update processes, ensuring a seamless and consistent workflow.

We introduced the capability to automatically generate feature environments using Gitlab CI. When developers create a new branch, they are presented with an option to dynamically spawn an isolated feature environment.

Platform Modernization Process

Infrastructure Setup

We implemented the foundational structure on AWS. This included creating an AWS Organization, setting up VPCs, launching Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and configuring key services like SQS, S3, ECR and Aurora PostgreSQL. These foundational steps laid the groundwork for a modern and scalable tech environment.

Application Onboarding

Here, we assisted Vestberry with app containerization, created Helm charts for streamlined deployment in Kubernetes. Additionally, we implemented a GitLab CI pipeline, automating the app deployment process.

Feature Environments

Using the GitLab CI pipeline we established a systematic approach for the creation of feature environments. This enhancement involved the addition of extra CI jobs and scripts, leveraging GitLab Environments for seamless integration.

Observability

We configured monitoring, logging, and alerting utilizing Thanos/Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana Alerts.

Outcomes

Our partnership with Vestberry led to the modernization of their infrastructure and the optimization of application deployment processes. Through the establishment of a robust AWS foundation and the implementation of services such as EKS and Aurora PostgreSQL, Vestberry achieved a scalable and secure environment.

The integration of a GitLab CI pipeline further automated deployment, providing the development team with enhanced speed and efficiency. Notably, the introduction of feature environments empowered developers to create and manage isolated spaces for testing. Importantly, this transformation did not impose any overhead on Vestberry developers, allowing them to maintain their workflow without the need for rapid adjustments.

Peter Drobec

Director of Engineering at VESTBERRY

We needed to manage cloud infrastructure more professionally and improve our software delivery pipeline. LabLabs was a great choice and we are impressed by their expertise, quality of service and superb collaboration.

Future Steps

Continuous support
Ongoing infrastructure enhancements
Potential expansion to additional regions

WHAT’S NEXT?